by Andrea Lee
5.
But it does happen that when she first steps onto the veranda of the Red House she feels a chill. Just a feather of cold air that brushes her skin. Uncanny, there and gone. For an instant it dizzies her, nearly makes her stumble. Probably a touch of heat exhaustion or migraine after the endless trip, instantly forgotten as she rights herself, lets go of Senna’s hand, and steps under the roof. Ever afterward, coming in from the blazing subequatorial sun to the deep shade of that house, Shay has the same sensation, which she’ll come to recognize as the signature of the place. With time she’ll welcome the feeling, think of it as marking a change in dimensions, an entry into penumbral solemnity, like entering an old Italian church.
Now her dazzled eyes adjust to take in the dim sweep of space, the double staircase up to the encircling gallery, the soaring ceiling of rafters and braided thatch. With its ground floor framed in open shutters, the place seems like a way station between indoors and out, walled with the mingled greens of tropical foliage, with a northern view over rice paddies and cane fields and a southern view down a palm-shaded walk to the sea. She stands in the center, staring around her, silenced by the realization of what Senna has achieved here. The spaciousness and air of comfort, the islands of gleaming colonial furniture, the richly colored kilims, the occasional statue: it is all just right, so much so that the usual wifely tasks of decoration have been abrogated. Except: “Why are the floors red?” she blurts out.
Senna, who’s been watching his wife’s reaction with childish eagerness, looks pained. He goes into a long, testy explanation of how this crimson painted finish is traditional around the Indian Ocean, and how much trouble it took to achieve it. And Shay dispels his annoyance by grabbing and kissing him while pouring out praise. Above all concealing her first unnerving impression: that the ground is covered with blood.
A flicker of movement reveals that the two of them are not alone—as no one ever is in that house. From behind the left staircase emerges a small group of Malagasy people, moving toward them a bit hesitantly: three men dressed in T-shirts and shorts and six women in blouses and floral lambas, their hair braided or knotted in twists. They are the domestic staff of the Red House, and they are all looking with intense curiosity at Shay.
What do they see? A tall, almond-skinned young woman dressed in crumpled Italian linen, her short kinky hair held back with a wide striped band like that of a sixties film actress. A pretty woman whose mixed-race looks could place her origin as Réunion Island or Mauritius, except for something American in her loose-jointed stance, her eager, unshielded gaze.
They themselves, this cluster of men and women, have skin tones that run the Indian Ocean gamut from sulfur yellow to Black-brown, and later, as she gets to know them, she will be able to trace in their lineaments the various tribes of Madagascar. But for now, she sees them as people who in some way look like her. People of color, similar to those who, passing her on streets in Italy and elsewhere around the world, exchange with her the swift, coded nod of diasporic cofraternity. Men and women who would not be out of place in a gathering of her relatives in Oakland or Washington, DC.
The difference from Black Americans being, she thinks—as she has on her trips to Ghana and Senegal—that the eyes of these residents hold a deep stillness, that they move through the world with the impeccable poise of people who live where their ancestors did, who have never been stolen or scattered.
“Ah, voici l’équipe! Bonjour, bonjour!” calls out Senna in a loud, joking tone, which is evidently the established way he relates to them. On her first trips abroad with Senna, Shay was at first mortified by the clowning persona he often adopted but has found to her surprise that his buffoonery works surprisingly well in countries where, in any case, Europeans are considered barbarians. The typical reaction is that Senna is at first tolerated with the indulgence reserved for children or lunatics, and then, slowly, an unexpected intimacy is born. Shay sees immediately from the expressions of the Red House staff that her husband is well liked, if not quite respected.
When, with the air of a ringmaster announcing a trapeze artist, he introduces her—“Et finalement—la plus belle fleur de l’Amérique: ma femme, Madame Shay!”—they address her in a sonorous chorus that sounds rehearsed: “Bonjour, Madame!”
But when she in turn greets them in painstakingly rehearsed Malagasy—“Mula tsara!”—they all burst out laughing.
It’s a pure expression of appreciation, and she and Senna find themselves giggling too. To Shay this spontaneous peal of laughter is an unlooked-for gift that offers a shining glimpse of connection, of possibility. Perhaps indeed things will work out here.
But just then the dark faces close up like shutters, as a fat white man with a walking stick stumps onto the veranda. A loud European voice barks: “Qu’est-ce que vous en faites là, à rire comme des couillons? What are you all doing standing there laughing like fools? Where are the drinks for Madame and Monsieur?”
This is how Kristos, Senna’s right-hand man in Madagascar, first appears before Shay, at the entrance to the house that will become their secret battlefield. Kristos the Greek, the house manager. Majordomo. Governante. From the start, her enemy.
He is Shay’s first live example of the kind of pan-European rogue who turns up in African backwaters and in every derelict former outpost of empire. Claims to be a Greek from Thessaloniki, speaks Italian with a Pugliese accent, French with a Marseille slur, and a disconcerting amount of English with an Australian twang. Officious, devious, an expert snitch and bully, he embodies the first mate of every pirate ship in B movie history. Shorter than Senna—who is not tall—he has a grand vizier’s belly that strains the waistband of his khaki shorts, a limp from some nameless catastrophe, a bulldog face purpled with rum, a bristle of stained mustache, and wispy, colorless hair bound back with a shoelace. And, like any stock character, he has props: a walking stick crudely carved with a coiling serpent; a neck chain displaying a coin he claims is a Roman aureus. When in the sun, he wears a sinister pink Panama hat.
Presented to the wife of his boss, he kisses the air over her hand as Europeans of social pretensions do. Behind his greeting there is a stony challenge that she’ll recall in future days, when she has begun to dread him. Why does he hate her so promptly? The answer is obvious: because her skin is as dark as that of the people he lords it over.
A thin smile crosses his lips as one of the younger housemaids hurries up to Shay and Senna with a tray bearing a pair of neon-colored drinks: canned pineapple juice tinged with grenadine syrup, served in tall glasses topped off with bougainvillea blossoms and plastic straws. This, he announces, is his own idea: to celebrate arrivals with a welcoming cocktail, as they do at swanky hotels in the Caribbean.
Shay and Senna exchange amused glances at this vulgarity. But Senna only says that they’ve thought from the start that it would be a fine thing to make use of the Red House, in the off-season, as a bed-and-breakfast, a chambre d’hôtes. That is their future plan. He adds that, now that Shay has arrived, the place will finally have the benefit of a woman’s taste. Shay is surprised by the mild tone which her husband—usually brusque with Italian employees—adopts with his manager.
“Ah, but Signora Shay must be completely on holiday when she is here,” counters Kristos smoothly. He spreads his ropy arms to indicate the staff who have scattered about their various duties. Around the edges of his squat, khaki-clad figure, Shay can glimpse the garden, a hortus conclusus dense with leaf and blossom. “The Signora won’t have to lift a finger,” adds the Greek.
6.
That night, when the watchmen have closed and locked the downstairs shutters, Senna undresses Shay ceremoniously by a flickering hurricane light in the master bedroom. Not exactly undresses, because she’s wrapped her naked self up in the embroidered bedcover so that he can unwind her, as Caesar is said to have freed Cleopatra from the fabled carpet. Senna has a hibiscus flower stuck behind one ear. It’s perhaps the best time they will ever have i
n the Red House. They’re drunk on Three Horses beer and vanilla rum; they’re stuffed from feasting on coconut rice and oysters chipped from rocks at the far end of the beach. They’re sunburnt from snorkeling. They’re worn out from looking over the house and playfully arguing about rooms for the children they haven’t yet had; from weaving plans for their friends who will arrive later in the summer, from discussing fishing trips, and overland treks, and motorcycle excursions into the backcountry.
When Shay stands stripped and giggling in front of him, Senna looks her over with an intent air of discovery.
“Well, monsieur le patron? Do I suit?” she demands. “I know you think I’m the last piece of furniture!”
“No, no—tu sei la madonnina. You’re one of those holy statues—you know, a Madonna, a saint—like the country people used to build into their farmhouse walls back in Vercelli.”
“A Black Madonna?”
“A professoressa like you doesn’t know about the wonder-working Black Madonna? She has shrines all over Italy!”
“Let’s forget about Italy,” says Shay, yanking the flower out of his hair.
Tired as they both are, they charge into each other like teenagers that night, with uncontrollable laughter and a transcendent feeling of arrival.
But deep in the night, Shay, a seasoned traveler who usually sleeps well even in bare-bones hostels, wakes up to the crash of the tide beyond the garden wall. Over the nocturnal chorus of frogs, it sounds annunciatory, as if a single solemn phrase were being repeated over and over again. She frees herself gently from Senna’s embrace and lies staring into darkness through the mosquito net of the huge four-poster bed. The disquiet she felt on the hillside this afternoon returns and becomes a wanderer’s desolation at waking in a strange place. The strangest of places, this Madagascar—whose very name, like Timbuktu or Samarkand, is used by Americans as shorthand for the very farthest away one can be. And suddenly Shay is homesick, but for where? For the shingled house in the Oakland Hills where she spent her happy childhood? For the assortment of East Coast student digs she occupied after that? For the Milan apartment where she has chosen to start a new life?
Certainly, this big barracks of a villa on the shore of the Indian Ocean could never offer such comfort. She pictures how the crested roof must look silhouetted against the night sky inscribed with Southern constellations. And then she imagines the dark island: cane fields whispering in the breeze, the forest alive with the glittering wakeful eyes of the small beasts; the villages sheltering the sleep of men and women like those she met today, all in mute dreaming conversation with ancestors. In those huts no one has to wonder where home is. From the ground under their dwellings their history rises and cradles them.
Lying there in the darkness beside her, Senna himself seems an unknown country. What does he feel about this house besides satisfied vanity? What does he find in this distant land, and in these people—and what of value is he bringing here?
And for herself she wonders: How the hell did I end up in this place? And: What do I owe? For something is owed, she feels certain.
For a long time she lies awake, listening to the waves and nervously twisting a lock of her short hair, until dawn comes with the clamor of cockcrow, a brief dogfight, and the call of a distant muezzin. All the time, she has been thinking. Thinking: I have a house in Africa…
Continue Reading…
Red Island House
Andrea Lee
About the Author
© Alexandra Muse Fallows
Andrea Lee is most recently the author of Red Island House, a novel about love, clashing cultures, and identity set on the tropical African island nation of Madagascar. She is also the author of the story collection Interesting Women, the novels Lost Hearts in Italy and Sarah Phillips, and the National Book Award–nominated memoir Russian Journal. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, she has written for The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, W, and The New York Times Book Review. Born in Philadelphia, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University and now lives in Italy.
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Also by Andrea Lee
Russian Journal
Sarah Phillips
Lost Hearts in Italy
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Andrea N. Lee
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Some of the stories in this work were previously published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope.
“Anthropology” was originally published in The Oxford American.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2001048228
ISBN 978-1-9821-7950-2