“Early one morning, the honey hunter brought his son with him to gather honeycomb. The villagers awaited his return, but as night fell, he was still missing. The next morning, an elder organized a rescue party. They followed the large footprints of the man and the light footprints of his child into the muddy woods. Suddenly, the footprints stopped. The villagers looked around. One of them pointed at the sky. Far above, two indris were leaping. Branch to branch, branch to branch they went. The villagers watched the two as they escaped into the forest. They believed these indris were the man and his son, transformed, and singing a sad song. Nobody knew why they’d changed. Nobody knew why they were singing. But they named the indri ‘Babakoto,’ meaning ‘Father Koto.’ Listen to them.”
We all stop and listen. The indris’ haunting, dissonant howl is an aching, an echoing, from all directions at once. In that lamentation is everything.
An hour later, our group happens upon a baby indri. He’s crumpled, lying in a clearing with a long red gash on one black limb. A feline creature with a cruel head like a mongoose’s leaps down from the branch above. He circles the baby.
Solomon holds up a hand, whispering, “It is a young fossa. Careful.”
Without thinking, I grab a stick. I poke at the fossa, urging him away from the indri. The fossa bats back. He’s mean, cunning. I shake the stick, infuriated by his gall. Finally, he saunters off with an infuriating confidence. I scoop up the indri, and everyone gathers around me to pet him as he trembles in my arms. He smells like leaves. So soft, so helpless.
“It’s a baby,” Solomon said. “But in our country it is illegal to keep Babakoto.”
“If I don’t take it, the fossa will come back and kill it.” I know right away we belong together. It’s something about the way he snuggles into me, curving his body to fit mine, like he is simply an extension of me.
“And so it goes. This is the way of things here.”
“But, if it’s taboo to hunt the indri, surely there’s no harm in saving the indri from being hunted by another creature? Otherwise what’s the point?”
“That’s different.”
I carry the indri back to the lodge. Inside my room, I fashion a bandage out of a rough towel. Perched on the edge of the bathroom sink, the indri stares at me, his eyes gleaming like two flashlights, silent and completely trusting.
Later, Solomon knocks on my door. He’s rounding me up for the nocturnal nature walk. “What do you think I should feed him?” I ask. At first Solomon resists my plaintive entreaties, protesting that what I’m doing is illegal, but three hours later, he returns with a poultice and gauze to dress the wound. I’ve worn him down perhaps. Or he’s just plain kind, more likely. Around dawn, he appears again. “Come, Tarini. I’ll show you what he can eat.”
We wander the rainforest, listening to the haunting daybreak sounds of the other indri. I’ve wrapped a sheet around my shoulder, and the rescued indri wiggles, settling into the sling. “How come he’s not howling or singing or whatever?” I ask.
“He’s just a baby. His song will come when he grows up.” Solomon snaps leaves from a bush. “You want young leaves. Like these red ones, see?”
A moment later, the right name for the indri drifts into my mind: Howl.
When Leon joins us a day later, we learn Solomon’s wife lives some miles east in the region known for vanilla cultivation. Our relationship with Solomon seems fated.
“If you’ll help us find a place, we’ll hire you as a consultant. As our private guide.” Leon turns from Solomon to me with his usual smug need to explain how things really are. “Locals will be more comfortable with us if he’s on board.”
I suppress a giggle, not wanting to upset someone who takes himself so seriously. From the start, I’ve secretly suspected Leon is in over his head, buoyed by a confidence I envy. But don’t get me wrong. Mixed in with my doubt is the hot, fierce desire to be proven wrong: I desperately want him to be right that I’m overly pessimistic, a downer, and that this will be our happily ever after.
Solomon brings us to his village, returning to the thatched house he shares with his wife while we bunk at the Ivolo Hotel. Wounds healed, Howl accompanies us on our quest for the right farm. While we’re alone together, I wait for his song, trying to coax it along by imitating the strange sound I remember. He cocks his head and looks at me funny. I make all sorts of strange sounds, but my familiar can’t find his voice.
***
After weeks of searching, Solomon finds us a farm mysteriously abandoned by a French vanilla baron. We fall in love. The village president requests a hefty sum for it, but even in the dim light, it is noticeable that Leon doesn’t flinch. This is both thrilling and disturbing. Maybe he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Maybe my parents and friends were right for thinking I was crazy to follow someone so cocksure, so unwilling to acknowledge doubt in any situation. I’ve never made a deal, never bargained, because I’m always anxious that someone will call me out, call me on being an outsider.
The village president shakes his head like he knows we won’t make it here and pities us for our delusion. And there’s Leon, puffing himself up like a little boy, making himself confident enough for the both of us. I feel shame like an anvil on my chest. Why should Leon have to bear all of the discomfort by himself? Leon’s got an energy that makes me feel all sparky inside, hopeful, like anything, even our crazy vanilla farm idea, is possible. So, I stifle my fears and latch onto his reassuring appearance of knowing. I nod along and try to look more certain. Back home, he was way more successful than me. Maybe he understands something about life that I don’t. We conclude the deal at twilight.
Solomon drives our Renault 4 up the long winding road to the dark farm. He holds two lanterns in either hand like luminous scales of justice. Outside, the night philharmonic is in full force—a susurrus of leaves, the yowl of wildcats, ghostly whistling, and the occasional bright chirp.
Inside, the air is dank, musty, subtly sweet. We light candles around the villa. We light the wick of a kerosene lamp by the straw-filled plank bed. Howl darts around the room, nosing furniture, seemingly delighted by everything he sees. Dried ylang ylang flowers slump over the windowsill in the big room—limp yellow claws tinged with chartreuse. I run a finger over the rosewood dining table and draw up a velvety coating of dust and silt. In the corner are erotic ebony carvings somebody left behind. I choose a shapely woman bent at the waist, bowing to an upside-down world, and place her in the center of the table, arranging ylang ylang around her like I’m setting up an altar. There is promise here. This villa could be a home.
“You are sure you will be all right here?” Solomon asks me. He doesn’t look at Leon.
“Yes, of course. Thank you.”
After Solomon leaves, we flop onto the bed. Leon starts reading a vanilla cultivation book out loud, his booming voice misplaced—outsized for this villa. I stroke Howl’s silky head.
“We’re hand pollinating? Won’t that be a little … intense?” Perhaps I should have asked more questions in San Francisco, but Leon’s color-coded spreadsheets and profit charts had seemed well conceived. Knowing nothing about where we were going, I was impressed with their financial detail and foresight.
Leon’s French father, Clement, had always wanted to return to farming, the vocation of his father and his grandfather before him. He’d died earlier that year, leaving Leon devastated, with no living family, but with a sizable inheritance and the half-baked notion that he should adopt his father’s dreams as his own. I’d met Clement just once, after Alzheimer’s had already ripped apart his memories and cognition, but I doubt that this sort of adventure on an island in the Indian Ocean is what he had in mind.
And we’ve come to an impoverished country, a country Clement’s father helped colonize. When I consider how little we truly know about the country, I feel afraid for us. Leon assumes his vast sums of money will make the adjustment easy-peasy, just as it made our dating smooth and unhampered in San Francisco. A do
llar goes so much farther in a Betsimisaraka village. But it’s not just about having the money to do this, I want to tell him, it’s not just about vanilla markets, or your past experience as a hedge fund manager. It’s about the villagers’ perceptions of us, about our ability to become a part of society here, to blend and belong. Knowing he’ll dismiss this as sociocultural mumbo jumbo, knowing he won’t give me any credit for knowing more than he does how hard it is to be completely new to a country, I stay quiet, fingering the rough blanket.
“It’s going to be awesome.” Leon’s voice booms. He slams the book shut. “We just need to hire some people in the village to do the pollinating.”
I tuck Howl into a basket stuffed with blankets in the corner, even though he’ll likely leave his post soon to skitter around the floor. He murmurs in protest but settles. “When do you think the flowers will bloom?”
“I think we should be able to pollinate the flowers in a few months after we’ve retrained the vines.” He keeps smoothing his hair back, a recognizable gesture of irritation.
“Are the vines supposed to be crazy and overgrown and black like that?”
“They’re supposed to coil around the support branches. But in this case, they’ve run wild for years, so … I don’t have all the answers yet, you know! Man! Sometimes you can be such a killjoy.”
I blow out the candles and turn down the wick. Thin wisps of smoke. The scent of melted wax curls toward my face in the blue moonlight. We reach for each other. His ocean cologne has worn off. His hard shoulder smells like wax and kerosene. A fruity musk. Or is that Howl? We’re in a place of beauty, but there’s also a danger—stepping off a precipice into the terrifying unknown—and my heart quickens, flutters up in my chest.
In my dream that night, I part my lips to speak. I’m standing outside my own body at some distance, watching my lips move, soundless. Nothing. Nada. After several false starts, I start singing the haunting, baroque melody of the indri. I realize at some point I am in a dream, and that if I stop singing, I will wake up, terrified that I may never sleep again. Tentatively at first, and then with verve, I keep on singing until morning. When I wake, Howl is lying in a pool of silence at my feet. I breathe heavily, exhausted by the intensity of my dream.
***
I imagine we’ll take a few days to relax, but Leon’s itching to retrain the vanilla vines. He pays five young, poor Betsimisaraka boys from the village: Louis-Paul, Pierre, Josef, Radama, and Antso. I’m sure they should be in school. According to Solomon, they need the jobs.
On sunny days, they bend sturdy vines over branches of the tutor trees, training vines around lateral branches, and burying them in soil to stop them from growing hundreds of feet. The morning passes quickly. Over lunches of zebu meat and rice and vegetable soup, I try to teach the kids English. I miss conversation. “Trop dur!” Too hard, they cry. The ebony figurine watches us from her upside-down vantage.
“English could be useful someday, if you do business with Europeans, or even if you’re just dealing with tourists like Solomon does,” I tell them. I’m not sure these boys in their frayed hand-me-downs will ever go to school, much less take jobs that require them to speak English, but it makes me feel better to believe I’m helping them, that I’m useful somehow.
Sometimes Leon spends lunch cursing over the slow dial-up Internet connection. Other times, he helps me with the English language lessons. “Try again,” he says when the boys trip over the words. “English is so damn illogical.” He smiles at me, his eyes reassuring and knowing.
There are no bookstores or libraries nearby, so I special-order books from overseas. The boys don’t care much for English lessons, but they love story time. They crowd around, all sharp elbows and ribs and murmurs, as I read with Howl on my lap. We try to translate certain phrases to French. I’d always wanted to learn French as a child, but my dad refused to let me take it as a second language. He believed it was an elite language. “I want you to fight for the masses, for justice. You’re in California, so you’ll learn Spanish.” He’d hoped to grow me into a Gandhi, a Che Guevara, a Martin Luther King Jr., one of these icons for justice, you know, who cared about fair conditions for the common people. But unsure of just what to say and whether I was even allowed to say anything, and always more attuned to beauty rather than fairness, I’d not turned into a fighter at all. Dad never really recovered from the disappointment.
After we decided to move to Madagascar, I’d taken a crash course in French, but learned only enough to get by at the market. And so, I read kids’ books that feature foodstuffs—The Hungry Caterpillar and Bread and Jam for Frances. Most of the food is entirely alien to the kids. After the third or so book, the boys fall asleep on either side of me, their warm breath tickling my shoulders, as I move them onto the ground. They wake later to train vines.
***
Nights in Madagascar are warm. We drink betsa betsa, rum made from fermented sugar cane, and steep herbs and bitter orange peel in jugs of liquor. We circle around memories of our lost San Francisco lives like planets around the sun. I miss the quietude of public libraries. Leon misses the buzz of televisions in the bullpen at the busy hedge fund where he worked and his community garden. Sometimes, soaked in rum, we confess transgressions and cry over personal tragedies, momentarily forgetting the unbearable dark cramped rooms of the villa, the claustrophobia, that oily kerosene smell. We have drunken sex, most of it vanilla, Leon jokes.
“It’s odd that such a lush fragrance is code for boring. We could go a little wilder,” I say. But we never do.
***
When Leon leaves for Brickaville to network, I hike through the woods in my red rain boots, splashing through puddles. I study the leaves overhead for the yellow eyes of lemurs. Rarely do we spot one, and if we do, it’s never another endangered indri. Howl leaps out of my arms the moment we step outside. He races across the boughs overhead. Sometimes, in spite of my unsteady footing, I follow Howl up a tree. I imagine what it would be like to be him in such a green paradise, to be far away from humans, free from their foibles, their perpetually defective and harmful systems. He waits for me before jumping to another branch, and soon I climb down again.
On one particularly long ramble, I spy a conspiracy of brown lemurs gamboling in a clearing. They pause, and Howl joins them, touching noses with a friendly lemur. I watch for a few moments, wondering if I should leave, whether I should allow them to bond properly, but then another, bigger lemur cuffs Howl in the face, and I can tell it hurts. He bounds back to me. I cradle him and even though I know it’s ridiculous, I reprimand the entire conspiracy at the top of my lungs. The other lemurs slink away, disappearing among the gangly rosewoods.
Occasionally Solomon drops by to help gather leaves. As we walk through the woods, he says, “Howl could do this for himself, Tarini. The indri should be living out here.” He says it offhandedly, but I can tell from the intensity of his gaze that it’s a rebuke.
I nod, as if to agree, and play a little game of telling Howl to leave. I know full well Howl has no interest in leaving me. We are a team. “Go on, go!” I shout for Solomon’s benefit. I can tell from Solomon’s expression that he doesn’t buy it but will put up with my charade. Howl jumps into my arms, whimpering. I hug him tight. “See?”
As the first year passes, Solomon and I grow closer, but he never warms up to Leon. I hear whispers when we walk around town: vazaha.
I confront Solomon on one of our forest strolls, and he admits that the older villagers are afraid of Leon because he reminds them of the French colonizers. The younger ones are simply following the elders’ cues. I feel for the villagers. I remember the stories my dad used to tell me about the British. Any of these villagers could be my family. They look startlingly like my great-grandparents, who had fought for independence. I’m surprised to realize that I feel more for them than I do for Leon. It’s like San Francisco, and all the things I had growing up have receded. I can barely remember that other person, that San Francisco s
elf, that city person who talked about disruption. A pall settles over our nightly drunken bonding. I am trying not to think about Leon as if he were a blurry, distant stranger, rather than my boyfriend.
***
Once a week, we trek into the village to buy groceries. Sometimes we run into Solomon at the market. “Have you hired your guards yet?” I’m buying a sack of rice and Solomon is examining loquats.
“No. But we don’t even have harvestable vanilla pods yet.”
Solomon shakes his head. “It is risky, what you are doing. You have a big farm. Many things could go wrong. There are kalamoro. There might be gangs.”
I did read about kalamoro in a guidebook. They’re wild, supernatural, hirsute imps who supposedly live in the mountains. But I hadn’t read about gangs. It seems ludicrous to anticipate violence. There’s too much gorgeousness. This red land seems more suited to a fantastic reinvention of what the world could be like than a place of theft and bloodshed. But Solomon’s round face is creased in fear for us. I bite my lip.
Leon appears, and drops a bumpy breadfruit the size of a football into my woven knapsack.
“It is not so safe. Kalamoro have been seen in these parts before, and you are almost two kilometers from the village. Until you are settled and you hire guards, you should not stay out there alone.”
“Guards?” Leon asks. “To protect us against make-believe creatures? No. I’m not going that far. We appreciate all your help, Solomon. But we can take it from here.” He pats Solomon on the back, the condescending way he’d pat a valet back home. Solomon flinches, and takes a step away.
Love Songs for a Lost Continent Page 11