She knew when she smiled in this particular way, adorable dimples marked her cheeks. And when she laid the shelf of her bosom against his arm, even the curt and disdainful man of business turned soft and malleable. He looked down at her fondly, chuckling with such arrogance she fully expected him to prance over to the mirror. “A nose on a stick … You’re quite right, Paul. He does have a rather large nose, now that you mention it. How silly of him! Why, how he gets any women at all to make love to him is beyond me. Oh my, not that I want that image stuck in my brain—no, what an unlovely image, no wonder all his women are naturals, Malagasy ramatoas who probably spend their days wishing they could have you …”
Paul set his tumbler on a table, and took Dagny by the shoulders. “Yes, yes, my doll … The day you set foot on the sands of this island was the happiest day of my life. Until that day, I was just an empty shell, a mere … a mere escargot of a man, sliding through life aimlessly, with no direction, no path—”
“—no trail to follow—”
“—yes, no trail, until I laid my eyes upon your perfect Venus form, ah, such an hourglass of beauty!” Carried away with passion, Paul fell to his knees before Dagny, clasping her to his breast and squeezing her so lustily she was compelled to press his shoulders with her fingertips, and look anxiously through the crack in the window curtains.
“Come, Paul, come!” Dagny exhorted. “Come to my bedchamber with me—no one knows you’re here except Zeke and Sal, and they’ll guard the door! Come! Then you can … you can turn my hourglass upside down, and I can rock you in the cradle of my womanhood!”
Thoroughly flustered now, with both epaulets knocked askew, Paul rose giddily to his feet and shook Dagny. “Yes, yes! Ah, my doll—I would be a dying pathetic vine on a cold stone wall were it not for you!”
“Yes! Let me warm up your leaves! Ah, what is that?” Dagny jumped two feet away from him, hopping like a bunny, hand held to her breast.
“What is what? I did not hear anything!”
“Oh! It’s just that arrack vendor! Let me get rid of him!”
“What? No, no, doll! Don’t open that door! Tell him to go around the back—Ah!”
Paul smacked himself in the forehead as she strode to the front door and flung it open.
The throngs of Malagasy crowded her front veranda with such huddled reverence they were packed like oysters in a pail.
“Ah!” Dagny cried cheerfully. “Manahòana!” Good afternoon!
Behind her, Paul tried to plaster himself to a wall while seething, “Dagny! No! Shut the door!”
“What’s going on in here?” Sal bellowed, entering from the dining room where he’d been bleaching ore of manganese with lime. “Ah, hello, Paul. Your epaulets are crooked.”
“Salvatore, you must help me! Bring the filanzana around the back by the carriage house—”
Dagny twirled around, clapping her hands. “Oh, Paul, isn’t it wonderful? Look at how the entire town has turned out to pay their respects to you! This man says they all heard a great financier was in town, and I do believe it would be the high point of their month if you went onto the veranda and gave a little speech.”
Lunging for the door, Paul fell against it, slamming it so stridently there was a comical sound of an “Ow!” on the other side. His vigorous face reddened by anxiety, he glanced rapidly from side to side.
“Salvatore!” He grabbed the front of Sal’s casually unbuttoned day-shirt. “You and Ezekiel have some religious garments, don’t you? Some of that Shaker—”
“Quaker,” Sal calmly corrected him.
“Give me Ezekiel’s hat!”
“Zeke’s hat will fall off you. His head is way too big.”
Paul thrashed Sal so thoroughly that Sal’s head wobbled on his neck. “Get me his big black religious coat!”
“I’ll get it,” Dagny offered.
Paul was bundled into Zeke’s Quaker costume. About twice as wide but the same height as Zeke, Paul filled out the jacket so as to resemble a juicy blood sausage about to burst from its casings. Nobody was fooled by the big black boat of a hat Paul shoved atop his wheat-colored pigtail, and he lashed out at beseeching Malagasy hands with his riding whip, as Sal and Dagny stood cheerfully waving good-bye.
Their smiles lingered after the filanzana cantered out of sight past a row of traveler’s trees, the flood of importuning humankind flowing in their wake, chanting “Mandra-pihaona!” I will see you later!
“Ah,” they both sighed simultaneously, hands folded before their laps. They gazed out fondly at the palm fronds that swayed like seaweed long after the last boy had gone.
Zeke emerged from the back kitchen door. “Hey! Where’s he going with my Bible-banging ensemble?”
Dagny and Sal glanced with disinterest at Zeke—he had ajar of peach preserves in his hand, and dipped his fingers directly into the jam. Nobody answered him, so he left.
Sal scooted closer to Dagny and enfolded her in his arm. She put her head on his shoulder like a puppy. “Now that’s over with. When are you coming with me to Barataria?”
Dagny squeezed him tight before retreating, in order to regard him with skeptical shaded eyes. He’d changed since arriving in Tamatave, a slow metamorphosis from a well-appointed man about town into someone sinister with a vaguely decadent cast. She supposed it was Tomaj’s influence, the obvious manner in which Sal worshiped the man. One evening she studied Sal as he stood at his laboratory table measuring a crystal with his goniometer. She marveled that with two hoop earrings, and his curly abalone-colored hair tied in a bun and stuck through with an enameled Chinese chopstick, he could easily pass for one of Tomaj’s band of men. Then it occurred to her. Sal had always worn two hoop earrings, and styled his hair into all manner of supreme coiffures. Perhaps it was just that Sal was akin to Tomaj from the start.
“Never, I fear,” she sighed, going back indoors as Sal trailed her. The “cottage” was really quite a bit nicer than her father’s house in Solsbury Hill, completely circumscribed by the wide, shaded veranda, a grand front entrance flanked with heraldic stained glass panels, and a gargantuan kitchen with a step-top cookstove and glass-paned windows to the ceiling.
“Never?”
She leaned against a table where she had been peeling pineapples. Listlessly she rubbed a piece of the fruit against her lower lip. “Never. Count Balásházy can’t abide the sight of me anymore, and I don’t blame him. To discover that I, an unwed woman, would … would … oh, you know what I mean!”
“No. No, I don’t know what you mean at all, Dagny. To discover that you are a woman of such high integrity, love, and righteousness that you’d carry on a pleasant friendship with a man of means in order to provide for your family? You know that I’m the last person on earth to speak well of Monsieur Boneaux, for I don’t like the gruff way he handles you, and I know he can never marry you, if he were so inclined. But I think I know Count Balásházy well enough to say with verity that he would not begrudge you a life of abundance. His only protestation is that … he would like to supplant Boneaux, and be the one to shelter you.”
“Shelter me?” Dagny guffawed so stridently, she spit pineapple juice onto the floor. “He’d sooner give me Moses’ Law than give me shelter! And I don’t blame—”
“He told me!” Sal pointed a finger at her. “Right after that altercation with Boneaux, Tomaj took me aside and said, ‘Sal, come and stay at my plantation. Bring Dagny, and keep her safe from Boneaux.’ Yes, he said that!”
Dagny waved a hand at Sal. “Oh, he may have said that. Said that. But even a globe-traveling merchant has got to have his limits. He certainly doesn’t want to be seen consorting with me, especially now that the entire island knows that I visit Mantasoa.”
“You’re wrong there! Tomaj isn’t like that. He was impressed when I told him how you’d kept us alive in New York.”
“Yes, but did you tell him how I accomplished that?”
During the silence, a few children who had been left behind in
the mad rush to follow Boneaux scratched at the kitchen window, their awestruck faces pasted to the glass. Dagny snorted half-heartedly. “I need to ask you something, Sal. As a man.” She walked to the arch that led to the dining room, poking her head this way and that to make sure Zeke wasn’t lurking. Sidling up to Sal, she addressed him obliquely, both of them gazing at a tin of flour on a shelf. “The most extraordinary thing happened to me, before Boneaux accosted Tomaj at the ball. Tomaj … touched me, but all he was doing was kissing me, and touching my breast, but it was in the most amazing manner, and …” Exhaling, Dagny dropped her hands to her sides. “He told me I had a female orgasm.” Suddenly clutching Sal’s arm, she whispered fiercely, “Is that possible? I’ve never heard of such a thing! Tell me, please. In your years of bedding women, did you ever see a woman have an orgasm?”
Smiling widely, Sal looked levelly at her. “I should hope so, unless most of them were pretending.”
“Then how does it work? Women cannot … ejaculate anything, as men do. How can you tell if a woman had an orgasm?”
“Well. If your prick or fingers are inside of her, you can feel the contractions.”
“Yes, contractions, that’s what it was like!”
“And if your mouth is there, you can taste the flow of juice, of fluids. Women do ejaculate.”
“Mouth? No! It’s impossible! We have no—”
“I’d like to find some god-damned fluid around here,” Zeke remarked as he entered the kitchen. Dagny and Sal froze in position, only their wide eyes moving from side to side. “Izaro told me that Ramananasoa ninny delivered an entire barrel of banana beer for me, but I haven’t seen the god-damned thing anywhere. Have you seen it?” Zeke tossed containers around on the shelf, as if the beer would be revealed to him.
Sal said, “Maybe he put it in the garden under the candle-nut tree. That’s where it was last time.”
“I thought of that, I looked already. All I’ve got is gallons upon gallons of that arrack that makes me shit in my hat and pull it down over my ears.” Zeke left the room in disgust. “Can’t get no reliable suppliers these days …”
“Now, Sal,” Dagny exhaled. “You’re such an aficionado of women. Why don’t you pursue that lovely Catherine LeClerc? You haven’t been your usual rapacious self lately, yet when you danced with her at the ball, you seemed so animated.”
Sal wearily rubbed his face. “Animated, yes. She’s a wonderful girl, interested in her pressed flowers, and her stultifying monologues about how rich her father is. No. Lately I’ve just been so … disinterested in the pursuit of girls. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s one of your ‘humors,’ maybe the black choler that you say causes melancholy.” He seemed to cheer up when he said, “Maybe it’s just the rigors of life on this Great Red Island.”
“Yes.” Dagny smiled remotely. “It isn’t easy.”
“Boy, another pipe. I’ve got a yen-yen.”
Tomaj feathered his hand across the steaming surface of the bathwater.
“Aye aye, Captain,” said Sal, in a giddy mood, since Tomaj had insisted he bathe first.
Tomaj had instructed Holy Eleanora Brown and her girls to empty, scrub, and refill the tub with freshly boiled water, imbued with attar of roses, cinnamon bark, and eucalyptus oil. Normally the women stayed in the bath-house, washing Tomaj with their sea sponges, massaging and pleasuring him, but today he wanted to luxuriate with Sal in privacy. “One more dream stick for you.”
A table that just reached the lip of the bathtub was ideal for assembling the afyuni layout. The spirit lamp, bowl scraper, needle, the bureau for pipe bowls, everything necessary for thorough enjoyment was there. This imbibing was such a central facet of the bath that this special layout never left the room.
The bath-house was Tomaj’s favorite room in his house. Tomaj had envisioned it as a Turkish hamam bath, where washing and purifying was a religious obligation. Artisans tiled the vaulted ceiling and walls with rich faience tiles, with particular intricacy about the round skylights. No water pipes had been installed, so the boiled water had to be hauled upstairs by way of the dumbwaiter, but there were drains in the floor under the tub and elsewhere in the tepidarium, so one could sit in a bath-chair and have the scum sluiced off one’s skin with a shell scraper. The women doused one with a pail of water that merely drained the dirt down the sewers, away from the house.
“Dagny did not wish to accompany you,” Tomaj stated, as Sal pressed a pea-sized pill of chandu onto the long needle and held it over the flame of the lamp. Sal was exotic today in an elaborate Chinese silk robe, sitting on a low pillow, his face level with the table. While Tomaj had languished underwater, Sal had apparently experimented with the girls’ kohl eye-black, a cast that suited his remarkable Cherokee beauty.
Sal shook his head, concentrating on the bubbling afyuni. “No. I tried. Believe you me, I tried. She’s convinced that you despise her, that you can never regain any respect for her.” The pill of opium caught fire, and Sal blew out the flame.
Reaching to the table for a bowl, Tomaj withdrew an egg and cracked it on the edge of the tub. It was an old Turkish trick for making the hair glossy. “I can’t possibly despise her any less, Sal.” He deposited a handful of the yolk atop his head, rubbing it in. “I’m the last person to judge. I, who carouse with four women at the same time? I hardly think I’m in a position to pass judgment. She’s a beautiful woman, and if she can use her beauty to advantage, no one should stop her. I don’t begrudge her a tolerable life. However, I did put her rare orchids outside the glass-house in a fit of rage that night, I’m afraid. Later, I tossed them out, so she wouldn’t have to gaze upon them dead and wilted.”
Yes. He’d been in such an angry, thebaic stupor he’d moved all her new specimens of sesquipedale outside of the glass-house and left them in the much cooler rain where they’d turned brown immediately. He wasn’t quite as unmoved as he led Sal to believe. The thought of that baboon Boneaux even kissing Dagny set a stew of rage boiling in the pit of Tomaj’s stomach, and he hadn’t been able to eat more than dry biscuits in three weeks, and drink some opium-infused treacle.
When he surfaced from rinsing his hair, Sal was saying, “—found a building for his kipping ken, do you know that two-story cottage near the harbor where the Indian convicts were staying before they became royal servants and went to Antananarivo?”
Slicking his hair back from his forehead, Tomaj shook his head to rid his ears of water. “Zeke’s establishment, you mean? Yes, the Indian servant is a good man. He just married a free woman. So Zeke is carrying out this idea? With the blessing of Boneaux, I presume?”
Sal rolled a new pill of chandu for Tomaj. “Well, yes, I suppose. Although I have the feeling Boneaux would be happy if … if we just continued to require his assistance, and never earned our own keep. He likes to be needed, to be ‘The Grand Frenchman.’”
“Is that so? Then I’ll push through Zeke’s plans with Radama. Many mariners and whalers could use a place like that, especially if it’s also to be a sort of knocking shop, with wenching. Hand me that bottle of castile soap.”
Sal crawled to another low table of inlaid mother-of-pearl to retrieve the bottle. “You’re really on back-slapping terms with the king, aren’t you?”
“He’s a likeable bugger.” Tomaj poured castile soap onto a sponge and languidly soaped his chest, looking up at the ceiling where moisture from the steaming tub water dripped twenty feet onto the tiles below. It was particularly pleasant to bathe in here during a rainstorm when sheets of rain roared over the roof and one remained snug, like an insect in a glass-house, water dripping onto one’s scorched places.
“He was a young, upright, and ambitious man when I came here ten years ago. At the beginning, he favored the French—anything English he termed ‘false,’ ‘as perfidious as the English’ was the saying—but he allowed men from the London Missionary Society in to build schools and teach the Bible. Malagasy was an entirely verbal language, but a few missionaries devised
the first written language utilizing Roman letters, and now I’d daresay upward of two thousand officers and students know how to write. He also—to our eternal good fortune—demanded that eight of his men be sent to London to be trained in music.” Draping one leg over the edge of the tub, Tomaj leaned like a flexible gymnast to soap it.
“Yes,” agreed Sal affably. “I’ve heard people talk, and they seem to think that ‘Jay-ho-vah’ is the name of our European ancestors.”
“And that the taratsy of reading and writing is a superior form of magic. Let them think that.”
“It is a superior magic, in a way.”
“Of course. There’s been a lot of resentment lately at the missionaries’ insistence on baptism and celebrating the European New Year—you’ll notice that in a couple months’ time. Regardless, Radama has allowed two twin brothers to sail for England, to be instructed by the Missionary Society. About ten years ago missionaries were granted a lease here on Madagascar for a decade. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the treaty expires.” Sinking his legs back under the water, Tomaj leaned forward to sponge his back.
Sal grabbed the sponge. “But what of Ramavo? She seems a bit, well… unbalanced. I’ve heard she’s ordered children put into pits because she didn’t want them learning Christianity.” He soaped Tomaj’s back between the shoulder blades, and suddenly Tomaj didn’t want to discuss politics anymore. Why did it always feel so much better when someone else washed oneself?
“Yes …” Tomaj breathed, head hanging between his knees. “Her bloodthirsty ways have been stayed by the moderation of Radama. She only enjoys the crucifixion story because it gives her new ideas for executions.”
Sal snaked the luffah into Tomaj’s sensitive armpit. It felt more heavenly than anything Tomaj had felt in … weeks. Groaning, Tomaj unfolded his long frame and leaned against the back of the porcelain tub, head cushioned atop his crossed palms.
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 14