by Andrea Lee
Like most big tropical residences, the place is a compound: breezeways lead to a separate kitchen and other outbuildings, including a bungalow for the house manager. But most striking is the expanse of floor that a visitor faces when entering. This floor is concrete: sanded, stained with many coats of iron-oxide paint, which, waxed and polished, acquires a warm maroon hue that glows in the shade of the cavernous roof almost like something alive. Because of it, nearby villagers immediately begin to call Villa Gioia ny trano mena—the Red House. La Maison Rouge. In any language, the appellation is such a natural fit that nobody, not even Senna, ever uses anything else, or after a short while even recalls that there was an earlier name.
Of course Senna’s acts of architectural hubris are minuscule in comparison to those of pharaohs, sultans, and Aztec kings. He brings his vision to life with the glee of an eighteenth-century English lord adding follies to his ancestral acres, or an American robber baron transplanting parts of dismembered chateaux to Newport. And in the end, mysteriously, it all works.
Though it could have looked cartoonish, the big roof rises with undeniable majesty above the feathery line of palms between the cane fields and the beach. Unlike anything built by the Sakalava, the Indian merchants, or the colonial French, it nevertheless appears plausible in that landscape, and Senna is delighted to see his creation up there against the sky. He isn’t a bad man; but after long years spent peddling irrigation valves, his soul is thrown off-balance by the possibilities of a country where he is not just a successful businessman, but a nabob.
So in a fit of arrogance he declares that he, Senna, won’t be guided by the broad hints of Colonel Andrianasolo and the local village headmen; will not inaugurate the new house with the customary feast for the construction workers, neighbors, and friends. Not until such time as he feels like it. Maybe never. And he will certainly never go to the trouble and expense of butchering a pair of black and white zebu bulls just to honor a lot of superstitious claptrap.
And so the islanders—the fishermen, charcoal burners, cane workers, hotel maids, gardeners, mechanics, market vendors, prostitutes, woodcarvers, middle-class shopkeepers, and professionals—observe this neglect of the proprieties without rancor, but with a sense of inevitable consequences. Particularly the Sakalava feel this way. They are the abiding ones, the teratany, residents essential to the place as volcanic bedrock, for generations washed over by the caprice and varied abuses of the vazaha, as they call the foreigners who come and go on the land. These locals know all about the disrespected dead, and they watch, unsurprised, as the Red House begins, even before it is furnished, to accumulate an evil atmosphere. It happens bit by bit, just as dust and litter build up in the corners of an unswept room.
And finally, as is so often the case, it becomes a woman’s job to clean things up.
3.
Shay Gilliam, Senna’s second wife, doesn’t imagine when she first sees the Red House that because of it she’ll soon be engaged in a life-and-death struggle, swept up in an occult battle that devolves on mastery, on many kinds of possession.
What are mastery and possession after all, but advanced forms of desire? And Shay, a university instructor raised with staunch East Bay political correctness amid the progressive Black middle class of Oakland, California, has, emphatically, never desired a tropical manse like a jumped-up plantation fantasy. Throughout a bookish childhood and beyond, Shay, always known as the flighty one in her family, has cherished many peculiar wishes (an ability to walk through walls is just one), but not once has she pictured herself as the chatelaine of a neocolonial pleasure palace, conjured up on African soil.
But the Red House has been in her husband’s life longer than she has. During their first meeting, at a wedding in Como, Senna boasts of his Madagascar project to Shay, as she flirts with him from under the brim of an extravagant couture straw hat, and their unlikely romance begins. Unlikely because the tall, mischievously smiling Fulbright scholar with her Ivy League degrees seems to have nothing in common with the short, pushy Lombard businessman whose sole diploma is a high school ragioneria certificate. Yet this odd couple surprise themselves, and those who know them, by promptly falling in love, with an intensity that precludes anything but joining their lives together.
Shay is bowled over by a man so different from the cerebral American and European lovers she’s had since she left her first brief marriage to her college boyfriend, a Jamaican medical student whose evangelical views on wifely submission emerged once vows were spoken. Senna is like no one she has known before: a man her father, a professor at Mills, disapproves of not because Senna is white and foreign—the family tree with its high-yellow Virginia roots includes many a Caucasian ancestor and their Oakland neighborhood is peppered with international marriages—but because he didn’t go to college. To Shay, fresh out of graduate school, Senna is a new experience: this cheeky, charismatic Italian a decade and a half older than she is, a businessman with an unfaltering grip on the concrete facts of life; a man who deals (in some mysterious commercial way) with agricultural machines; who buys land—has bought part of an actual island. A man who hustled his way out of poverty, the way so many Black Americans have had to do. A man, she early discovers, who conceals behind his pragmatic exterior a vein of wayward fantasy that matches her own.
Senna, a sensualist by nature, at first pursues Shay for her physical beauty—the length of her, her body with its gleam of terra-cotta, her shallow-set eyes that render her face both stern and childlike—beauty that could belong to many hot terrestrial places where different races intermingle in seaports. Moreover, she is American, like the film actresses he worshipped as a kid at Cinecittà. He is impressed by her fancy education, her fluent Italian and French, her schoolmarmish air of familiarity with all corners of the far-flung landscape of literature. But mostly he is drawn to an unknown quantity, a recklessness he finds deep in her gaze.
The construction of the Red House runs parallel to their courtship, something that by unspoken agreement remains behind the scenes, almost like an erotic secret. Shay visits Naratrany on their first trip together, passing through from Cape Town to Mauritius; she sees a concrete foundation and a beautiful blank beach and hardly thinks of it again.
But Senna, privately, remains obsessed. He feels, somehow, that the house is a task he has to complete before he can properly embark on this second marriage. He travels back and forth from Italy to Madagascar and, on a business trip to Hong Kong, fills a container with old Macau furniture and has it shipped to the island. He hires an unemployed Greek hotel manager named Kristos to act as foreman for the construction and, later, to run the place. In the back of his mind, he holds an evolving image of his creation: the lofty framework of the roof rising bare as a giant hoopskirt between the hills and the ocean. Lilliputian figures of palm thatchers clamber nimbly over the wooden ribs, filling in the spaces.
For her part, Shay is distracted by love, by marriage, by remapping career plans. Her thoughts are overwhelmed by the whole new direction of her future—a circumstance she is aware that she courted years earlier, when she began to focus her studies on Black expatriate writers like William Demby, and came to Rome for dissertation research. Now she, too, has chosen the expatriate path, and in this whirlwind of change the idea of a connection to a construction site far away near the Tropic of Capricorn is too much to contemplate. Italy is enough of a challenge, with its labyrinthine family dynamics, its sunlit surfaces concealing shadowy Catholic taboos. She assumes that her relation to Madagascar will simply be an extension of the European culture she is learning to negotiate; part of the custom—slightly shocking to industrious Americans—of long vacations, the idle existence of the watering place, the villeggiatura. In her early view of this new life, Naratrany features simply as a decorative detail: a wallpaper print, like an exotic toile de Jouy.
Only Senna’s mother, a sturdy, good-humored widow, reveling in prosperity after a youth spent stitching rice sacks, sees the connection between the
amiable, brown-skinned American professoressa her son has presented her as a second daughter-in-law and the property he has acquired in hot, brown, and heathen Africa. Like many Italians, she has few qualms about race and quickly grows fond of Shay, who impresses her as ladylike, if a bit high-strung; but, knowing her boy, she predicts that things will not go easily for his new wife—as things will not go smoothly with that wasteful and unnecessary vacation villa he has built in the jungle at the dangerous ends of the earth. It’s the fault of those Salgari books, she thinks, and she’s right. But she keeps her mouth shut.
4.
“Look what a palace I built for you!” boasts Senna, when Shay first sets eyes on the Red House.
It is July in the late nineties, before there are direct charter flights from Italy to Naratrany. Husband and wife, married six months, have made the overnight haul from Milan to Paris, then Paris to Antananarivo, the capital in the rugged interior of Madagascar. Awaiting their connecting flight to the coast, they spend a day and a night in an old French colonial hotel, their moods cast down by the cold up-country climate. The air is full of history and ghosts there in the City of the Thousand, sacred highland seat of the Merina kings and queens, ancient scene of sanguinary clashes with religious heretics and intrusive Europeans. Though the streets pullulate with crowds and decrepit vehicles, there is an otherworldliness to the place, with its stark azure skies, the stone arches of its ruined palace, its brick houses stacked along the hillsides like toy blocks, its beggar children gazing through blowing dust with the shining eyes of angels. Shay studies the faces around her, with their mixture of Asian and African traits, and feels that she is somewhere unlike any other place on earth: a city aloof, melancholy, and—despite its decay and festering poverty—emanating a strange, secret purity.
At dawn they fly to the coastal islands. In dazzling sunlight, the Indian Ocean reveals from above its deep patterns of blue buried in blue and Naratrany draws closer, rolling with green pelt of cane and forest, coral beaches blazing like sudden smiles, mangrove swamps bleeding mud into the sea. Then the descent from the small plane onto the macadam airstrip and the first caress of tropical air like an infant’s hand on the face.
On her first brief stopover, Shay found Naratrany a place of standard postcard beauty. But today in the coastal heat, she finds the same powerful atmosphere of secrecy and innocence as in the cold highlands. The morning air has an almost supernatural clarity as she and Senna head out of the tiny airport in a dusty Toyota pickup and jounce along a once-paved road through a landscape out of the morning of time. Falling away from each side of a high ridge are green declivities that cup dense groves, crowned with flambeaux of red blossom and hung with giant lianas bearing seedpods the length of a man’s arm. She can imagine the rare animals hidden deep in the leaves, their jeweled eyes veiled against the sunlight: lemurs, aye-ayes, dwarf chameleons, flying foxes—arcane species alive nowhere else on earth.
Shay, typically, has consulted no guidebooks, but instead skimmed a motley assortment of writing on Madagascar: annals of early Chinese and Persian explorers; records of Dutch slavers; convoluted accounts of Merina and Sakalava alliances with England and France; yellowed treatises by amateur naturalists and missionaries like the redoubtable James Sibree; histories of adventurers like the shipwrecked seaman Robert Drury, or Jean Laborde, the French industrial wizard and lover of the Merina queen. From this patchy research has come one clear idea: outsiders always want something from Madagascar. The emotion is always the same, whatever the thing desired: whether it is to establish the country as a locus for fabulous legends of gigantic birds and man-eating trees; or as a source for gemstones, rare butterflies, rosewood, spices, slaves; or as fertile ground to produce sugar, vanilla, raffia, cocoa; as a foothold for ascendancy in the Indian Ocean; or even—as Hitler once planned—as a convenient penal colony for the exiled Jews of Europe.
These thoughts are in her mind as they pass Saint Grimaud, the harbor town. Once a French administrative center, it is now a crumbling backwater where zebu graze in the weedy promenade, and washing is spread to dry on the battered cannons above the port. Near the central market, vendors and customers in bright lambas stream by bearing baskets of vegetables and sacks of rice on their heads, pushing past schoolchildren in tattered smocks, bush taxis crammed with passengers, mud-caked tractors transporting field hands. A turn at a crossroads lined with food stalls leads past an overgrown European cemetery, then across a river where half-clothed women pound washing against stones. And soon the dusty brick-colored road bursts into open country, carrying them through a roiling sea of sugarcane, dotted with abandoned hulks of dead machinery.
“A few more years and this cane will all be gone,” remarks Senna. For this arrival, he has already assumed his vacation persona: hair in a military crop, camouflage vest, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that suggest that to complete the look he should have an AK-47 slung across his back. “Since independence, the sugar bosses have been getting by with the old French machines. Even when the Marxists were in power back in the seventies, they didn’t turn their noses up at colonial leftovers! But it’s been too long—the soil is worn out, and the gear is falling apart.”
“Can’t your company help?” asks Shay, thinking of the clanking combine harvesters somehow connected to Senna’s work. She sees sugarcane as an emblem of historical evil, but she is sure that the abrupt death of an industry will create extreme misery.
Senna laughs and pats her knee. He has no sentimentality when it comes to business. And he loves to explain things to his overeducated wife, robust truths about the way the world functions outside of books. “We charge actual money, which nobody has here,” he says. “No, it’s going to happen: the cane will die, this land will go up for grabs, and tourism will close the gap. Golf courses, big hotels, like on Zanzibar and Mauritius. That’s the future for places like this. But tesoro, you know we’re not here for work. Did I tell you the story of Libertalia?”
“Libertalia is a myth,” says Shay mildly, for the umpteenth time, as she settles her sunglasses and tightens her scarf to protect her short hair from the blowing dust. She doesn’t go into the literary genealogy she found when she sourced the legend: how it appears in just one book, A History of the Pyrates, posited to be the pseudonymous work of Daniel Defoe; how the tale fits into the utopian travelogue tradition that runs back beyond Thomas More, to Plato and Eusebius. And how she was surprised to discover that, in modern times, William Burroughs chose Libertalia as the setting for his apocalyptic novella Ghost of Chance. But Shay has no inclination to lecture her husband about literature. He wouldn’t listen anyway, and, strangely enough, this is one of the things she admires about him.
Senna has gotten increasingly worked up as they approach the Red House and his big reveal; he schusses the truck around the pits and gullies of the broken road like a kid on a dirt bike. They pass a congeries of discolored cement huts built for fieldworkers, where ducks and chickens wander, women pounding rice in tall wooden mortars look up curiously, and small ragged children run out waving. “Salut, vazaha!” they holler.
Dust billows as Senna jolts to a stop beside a half-buried railroad trestle road once used to transport cane. At the crossing is a corroded warning sign still displaying the faint image of a small locomotive, like a nursery school drawing. There the land rolls downhill and offers the first view of the roof of the Red House rising above treetops against the impossible blue glare of the sea beyond.
“Look what a palace I built you!” Senna makes his proclamation now, throwing his hands open wide in an impresario’s grand gesture.
And Shay is surprised to feel her breath catch in her throat. Conflicting emotions seize her: a flare of feminine pride that Senna should have tried so hard to impress her, but also alarm. She realizes that she’s been hoping the house wouldn’t be beautiful—has vaguely felt that it would be easier to accept if it were tasteless: overblown, like a reception hall at a tacky beach resort, or cramped, like a badly p
roportioned summer cottage—the kind of place you end up loving like an annoying relative.
Instead she sees a lofty thatched roof peak, with something impressive about its isolation and its size, taller than the tallest palms that fringe the long bay. Shay recognizes the harmony of the proportions, and in the same moment feels that something about the place is all wrong. Not its architecture, but its mere existence is an error in a way she can’t yet define, but which goes far beyond being an emblem of wealth in a land of poverty. What she does know, immediately, is that—of course—it was never built for her. The reality is that here, in this remote corner of the world, her new husband has raised a monument to an unseemly private fantasy. And now that she has seen it, she somehow shares the blame.
Into her mind comes the opening line of Out of Africa, a book that she has both loved for Blixen’s lapidary prose style and deplored for the grandiose paternalism that shapes the author’s vision. “I had a farm in Africa…” As a college freshman, eager to establish herself as a cultural warrior, she once wrote a passionate essay describing those few words as the rallying cry of imperialist oppression. For what does had mean, eighteen-year-old Shay typed furiously, but the act of rape?
Now these thoughts dissolve as Senna leans over the gearshift and hugs her uncomfortably against the pockets of his camouflage vest. “Well, what do you think?” he demands.
“È bellissima,” Shay tells him. Because that is the truth, and for now other truths are unsayable.