Audio: Andrea Lee reads.
The adventure of the lost heirs begins when Shay and her friend Giustinia run into Harena at the Fleur des Îles café. This happens in the early two-thousands, at the same time that a criminal at large on Anjavavy Island is cutting off people’s heads. The mysterious beheadings are not connected to the events recounted here, except to establish the lawlessness that is always present behind the dazzling Anjavavy panorama of sugar-white beaches and cobalt sea. The crimes begin to surface one hot January morning, as a French hotel manager is taking his predawn constitutional along Rokely Bay and spies through a mist of sand flies something just above the tide line that looks like an unhusked coconut. It turns out to be a human head, one that was last seen on the shoulders of a part-time sweeper at the Frenchman’s hotel.
In the next months, four more severed heads are discovered, hideously marooned near grounded pirogues, on paths through the sugarcane, and even on the rocks that are used by villagers as public toilets. The victims are all men from various Malagasy tribes: Antandroy, Tsimihety, Sakalava—night watchmen and groundskeepers of so low a status that no one bribes the island gendarmerie into investigating their deaths.
This is the state of affairs when Giustinia arrives from Florence to spend two weeks at Shay’s place on Anjavavy, before embarking on a trek on the main island of Madagascar. It is early summer, and the two of them have the Red House—the vacation villa and small hotel owned by Shay and her husband, Senna—to themselves: most of the staff is on leave, and the place is empty both of paying guests and of the swarm of family that will come from Milan in August; Senna will arrive later in the month. Giustinia is a poet and a critic, an elegant woman who became friends with Shay when Shay translated some of her essays for an American magazine, and they discovered that they shared a passion for Victor Segalen’s eccentric early-twentieth-century monograph on exoticism. But while Shay, an African-American scholar transplanted to Italy and, for part of each year, to this small island in northern Madagascar, finds her interest drawn to restless expatriate artists of color, Giustinia, whose noble family has ancient roots in Tuscany, most often writes about the inescapable pull of a place to which you belong entirely. Her regal air is quite unconscious, based mainly on the authority with which she can speak about famous authors she knows. In spite of her worldly connections, she has the unexpected ingenuousness of those rare aristocrats who are still safely contained within their insular history. Shay intends to keep from her the news that there is a serial killer at large.
Aweek into Giustinia’s visit, the two friends go food shopping in Saint Grimaud and, after the heat and the stench of the outdoor market, stop for a cold drink at the Fleur des Îles. Harena is just leaving the café as they pull up in the truck. When she sees Shay, she calls out a greeting in her childish voice, raises one slim brown hand, and flashes her incandescent smile. Then she floats past the one-legged beggar perched on the Fleur des Îles steps and climbs into an odd-looking customized dune buggy, where a bald middle-aged Frenchman sits beeping the horn impatiently.
“What a stunning girl,” Giustinia remarks, as she and Shay chase flies from a sticky table on the veranda and settle themselves where they can keep an eye on the baskets of vegetables and bread in the back of the pickup.
“Yes,” Shay says. “She’s half Italian.” And, acting in her role as exasperated hostess—for, during the week with Giustinia, there has been no rococo tropical sunset, no rare lemur or chameleon, no gaudy market stall, no fluorescent coral or blinding expanse of beach that has dispelled her guest’s queenly, slightly bored air of expecting something more—Shay sketches out the story of Harena, which is a sort of legend on Anjavavy.
The girl is presently about eighteen years old. Her father, Leandro, is a heroin addict from a noble Roman family, a family that shipped him off to Madagascar when he was in his early twenties. For a few years, he lived on rum and drugs out in the bush at the north of the island with Heloise, a Sakalava seamstress, and during this time Harena was born. When Harena was three or four years old, Leandro’s father died, and Leandro returned to Italy, where he’d inherited an estate in what Melville once called the “accursed Campagna” of Rome.
He soon cut off contact and stopped sending money, and when Heloise, who had taken up with a French merchant from Saint Grimaud, perished suddenly after a miscarriage, the girl was left at the mercy of her grandmother, who wasted no time in settling her gray-eyed, barely pubescent granddaughter with Hans, an affable middle-aged German, who sold construction materials. Shay first saw Harena with him one Saturday night, when the girl must have been about fifteen, standing forlornly on the crowded concrete dance floor of Tonga Soa, clutching a large vinyl handbag, while Hans cavorted in a karaoke show onstage. Harena, even then, was extraordinarily pretty, with fawn-colored hair and skin, long spindly legs, acerbic breasts, and a beauty mark beside an arched nose that looked as if it belonged on an ancient marble statue in a museum thousands of miles away.
Shay is warming to the subject when Giustinia suddenly interrupts. “Wait!” she exclaims, and then, incredibly, adds, “I know this story. I didn’t remember that it happened here. I know him—Leandro. The father.”
It is almost noon, and the Fleur des Îles is filling up with rich Malagasy and Indian kids from Lycée Sacré Cœur, devouring pains au chocolat and monopolizing the three back-room computers. Outside in the glaring dusty street, ragged boys hawk trays of samosas and Comoran women with laden baskets on their heads file down to the port.
Shay watches them as Giustinia tells her that, in the tight circles of old Italian nobility—which are as closed as kinships can be on Anjavavy—she’s met Leandro a few times, at weddings. Moreover, one of his sisters is married to a cousin of Giustinia’s husband. Leandro is a sort of Italian Sebastian Flyte: extravagantly good-looking, a hopeless addict, and now a doomed recluse. What made him notorious was that eighteenth-century-style exile, imposed by his family, to an island that no one had ever heard of, in the north of Madagascar.
“I’d like,” Giustinia says, gazing into the dregs of her glass of papaya juice, “to meet this Harena.”
Later, Shay wonders why she saw no harm in this. It has to do, she thinks, with the general trifling nature of her behavior in Madagascar, where her brown skin and her American expansiveness lend her a false sense of familiarity with the people of color around her: people of the island, whose language she doesn’t speak, and whose values and motives she will never fully understand.
Shay mentions to Romolo, the Italian proprietor of the Fleur des Îles, that she wants to talk to Harena, and, sure enough, early the next afternoon she catches sight of the girl making her way down the beach toward the Red House, in the indolent manner of a cat that has just decided to roam in that direction. She is dressed in white jeans and a tight sleeveless top that drapes from a metal ring around her neck, and her pale, kinky hair, free of extensions for once, is caught up at the crown of her head in a pouf that is very becoming.
When Harena, Giustinia, and Shay sit down on the veranda, Shay can see that her friend is, for once, at a loss. It is one thing to take an impulsive interest in someone whose life seems like a fairy tale, and it is quite another thing to have that beautiful young person sitting in front of you with shining, expectant eyes and a valiant, determined poise. Giustinia, who this afternoon has been writing an essay on Octavio Paz, is a handsome brunette in her late thirties, presently barefoot in a bathing suit, with a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched on her freckled nose. She looms over Harena like a dowager empress over a royal pretender.
After ascertaining that Harena understands Italian, she tells her that she is acquainted with Harena’s father, and that Harena much resembles him.
The effect on the girl is electric: she begins to tremble. And Shay thinks that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it: making such a statement is like promising a shower of gold. For years, Harena has nourished herself on the myth of her Italian father, and now it is impossible to keep the subject within the bounds of simple conversation.
Then Harena begins to tell the two women something that Shay has never heard before. That when she was sixteen, her first lover, Hans—who always treated her with great respect, she says, as he would have treated a white girl—gave in to her pleas and took her to Italy. And there she actually made it to the gate of the country villa near Nemi from which her father, years before, had sent her a single letter. The gatekeeper, a peasant who spoke mainly dialect, told her that the house was closed and the family abroad. Through the gate, she could see up a long road, bordered with umbrella pines, to what looked like the gleam of parked cars. She told the gatekeeper that she was Leandro’s daughter, and he told her to go away. She left a letter stuck in the gate, and afterward wrote from Anjavavy, but there was never a reply.
Soon after recounting this tragic story, Harena finishes her Coke and departs, but not before giving Shay and Giustinia three kisses each, Malagasy style, with fervent emphasis, as if her fate were now in their hands. She leaves the Red House through the back entrance, which leads to the road through the rice field, where Shay can hear the tootling horn of the Frenchman’s dune buggy.
Speechless, Giustinia and Shay stroll down to the edge of the sea. It is close to sunset, and low tide, and they stand in the warm water and watch a little band of village children drag-fishing in the shallows with a length of tattered cloth.
“She does look like Leandro,” Giustinia remarks, after a pause.
“What are you going to do?”
“I suppose I should contact the family. His sister . . .”
But she sounds vague. Shay also has conflicted feelings. She knows that Harena is who she says she is, yet it is difficult to believe the tale of that trip to Italy. First, it is too hard to imagine that Hans, the eminently practical German, would go through the byzantine process of getting a tourist visa for a Malagasy girlfriend he didn’t intend to marry. Second, Harena told the story in the same histrionic tone that Shay has heard her use, at several parties, in tipsy rants about the wealth and power of her Italian father.
“You’ve opened Pandora’s box!” Shay’s next-door neighbor, Madame Rose Rakotomalala, exclaims, when Shay and Giustinia go over for tea the next day. Madame Rose is a wealthy Merina from the capital and has scant esteem for the Sakalava and other coastal peoples. “She is not at all a nice young woman! She takes after the mother, who was no seamstress but a bar girl, plain and simple, and she drinks and smokes rongony all day long. Harena acts innocent, but she starts fights, even with bottles, right in the road. Now that Hans has disappeared, she goes from one white man to another, except when she is working changing money for those Comoran hoodlums. We’ve all seen her in the café, counting out stacks of cash.”
Here Madame Rose gets up from the table and leans her slim waist over the railing to harangue two of her maids, who are hanging out clothes beside the generator. She resumes, “If you start trying to help that girl, it will be one thing after the other, and none of it good. Besides, if you go tracking down all the white men who leave children behind, that, too, will never end.”
Giustinia, more spurred on by Madame Rose’s ominous warning than anything else, stubbornly e-mails her husband’s cousin with the news of her discovery of Harena. But she seems relieved, as is Shay, when the days pass with no reply, and her departure from the island grows nearer.
Still, a curious social electricity now seems to surround Giustinia and Shay. Harena comes by twice, breezing into the garden with casual assurance, making no requests but simply regarding them with that same ecstatic, expectant gaze. Meanwhile, Shay begins to notice Malagasy people she has never seen before standing on the beach and staring at the Red House. And, whenever she and Giustinia pass through Rokely Village in the pickup, they cause a palpable ripple of interest. A Sakalava woman who runs a used-clothing stall tells Shay that word has spread that Giustinia is really Harena’s Italian grandmother, a rich and titled matriarch, who plans to take the girl back to her father’s country, or, failing that, to shower her with enough wealth to build a big house for herself, her uncles, and the rest of her family in Madagascar. (Though youthful Giustinia would be insulted at the supposition, the islanders afford enormous prestige to grandmothers.)
Naturally, Shay says nothing to Giustinia about all this, and the rest of her friend’s visit passes quickly—without, to Shay’s intense relief, another attack by the head-hunter. Shay introduces Giustinia to Père Joachim, a Betsileo priest from Antsiranana, who is the author of a lengthy treatise on Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and other Malagasy poets, and the three spend a delightful evening discussing the Négritude movement, Machado de Assis, and James Baldwin. On the morning of her departure, Giustinia has still heard nothing from Leandro’s sister, but she promises to make a round of telephone calls when she gets back to Italy. “I feel strangely under obligation,” she confides to Shay.
“You’re trying—what more can you do?” Shay replies, also feeling weighed down by a peculiar burden of duty. One thing she has learned in her few years of sojourning in Madagascar, with its convoluted history and its pulse of dark magic concealed just under the skin of events, is that, in this country, whatever happens close to you—under your roof, say—becomes part of you, though you may not realize it at the time.
Giustinia departs, with kisses and effusions, leaving behind an envelope containing the generous sum of thirty euros for Harena, as well as an almost new beach dress.
The next day, Shay doesn’t receive a visit from the girl, as she half expects to, but while she sits reading after lunch she hears a subdued hubbub from the far end of the garden, near the gate to the beach. Soon, Tumbu, the old man who fills in as factotum when there are few guests in the Red House, calls out to her that there is someone down by the water who wants to speak to Madame Shay. When Shay asks who, he mumbles confusedly that it is someone from the Grande Terre.
Squinting against the high-tide wind that rattles the palms, Shay follows Tumbu’s grizzled head and bare, wiry back down to the seawall at the end of the garden. There she finds waiting a tall, unbelievably handsome teen-age boy whom she has never seen before but recognizes immediately, for he is almost a twin of Harena. He has the same fawn coloring and sculptural nose, but his eyes are the clouded turquoise of certain Alpine lakes, which gives him an oddly blind look in the blazing subequatorial sun. He is barefoot, dressed in long shorts and a tattered Italian football jersey, and his sandy hair is clipped close to his skull. Shay greets him in French, asking him his name, and invites him into the garden, but he stands staring at her with those eerie eyes and replies in a Malagasy dialect that Shay doesn’t recognize.
“He doesn’t speak much French,” Tumbu explains, rather condescendingly. “His name is Didier, and he is from Morondava, far south of here, and he wants to see the mother of his father, who is the Italian Leandro.”
Didier will come only a single step inside the Red House gate, so Shay stands with him near the threshold, and, as Tumbu interprets, learns that the boy is sixteen and was born, on Anjavavy, to a young woman of the southern Sakalava tribe, named Adi, who worked as a hotel maid. Leandro never lived with Adi, but “he loved her” and, after the boy was born, paid for her to return to her family on the big island, promising to join her there. Of course, he never appeared or contacted her, and eventually, leaving her son with her people near Morondava, she found work at a shrimp farm in Mahajamba Bay and soon afterward died there of malaria, as so many do in that harsh line of work.
A week ago, word somehow reached Didier’s grandmother that Leandro’s mother, and possibly Leandro himself, had arrived at the Red House on Rokely Beach, on Anjavavy, and that finally the Italian father wanted to lay eyes on his children. So Didier left Morondava and travelled north, for four days and nights, by foot, bush taxi, and ferry. Once on Anjavavy, he walked the six kilometres from the port to Rokely Beach.
As Shay listens, she becomes more and more furious. With herself, with Giustinia, and with a tall Italian phantom who seems to have been summoned up from the ground beside her. Now that she has seen two of Leandro’s children, she can imagine exactly what he, the absent father, is like: his aristocratic height; his useless blond beauty; his addict’s vacant face; his idle concupiscence; his suzerain’s habit, bred in the bone, of taking whatever he wants; his ruthless indifference to everything that isn’t the chemical in his veins.
And now, she wonders, what to do with this magnificent son out of the famine-ridden south, who has travelled across land and sea, chasing a rumor? A rumor that she, Shay, helped start?
“Does he know Harena? His sister?” Shay demands of Tumbu.
“He knows who she is.”
As the boy continues to stare at Shay with those mineral-colored eyes, panic seizes her. “Tell him,” she says to the old man, “that his father and grandmother are not here. That the woman who was here is not Leandro’s mother, and she is gone now, anyway. That woman is only a friend who knows the Italian family of his father. She is a friend who promises to look . . . who will help find . . . No, tell him that I myself will help . . .” Shay stammers in confusion, suddenly gripped by a cinematic vision of snatching this beautiful youth out of his present life, as if she were conducting a helicopter rescue at sea. In an instant, she pictures schools, clothes, university, some grand career, where that flawless face would gleam in the high marble halls of European tradition. Later, she will tell herself that this is a maternal impulse, but it is as selfish and intoxicating as sex.
That Didier shows no surprise or disappointment increases Shay’s confusion.
“Ask him what he needs,” Shay tells Tumbu. “Money, food, a place to stay?”
Soon, the old gardener, with a hint of a dry smile, informs her, “He needs nothing, Madame. He has a job as an apprentice mechanic, and in two or three months he will go to Mahajanga to work on trucks.”
“Will he stay now with his sister—with Harena?”
“No. He’ll go back home immediately. You can”—the old man pauses, and then announces in a formal tone, as if affording Shay a rare privilege—“you can pay the price of his journey.”
Shay doubles the sum, but even so it is a laughably small amount. When she gives the notes to the boy, she notices that his hands, too, are beautiful: long and slender, though already rough from labor, and scarred with what appear to be burns. As she comes close to him, he suddenly looks her straight in the eye, with an intensity that feels like a blow, and says something in a low, forceful voice.
“He wants to know,” Tumbu says, impassively, “why it is that his father has not once come to look for him.”
Shay stammers that Didier’s father has been sick for many years in Italy.
And, before her shame at this transparent falsehood has evaporated, the boy coolly bids her farewell and turns away. Shay watches his tall, sculptural figure and cropped head departing down the three kilometres of beach, skirting the incoming tide. He walks like a king in exile, seeming to cast a sort of furious solitude around himself. And, as he grows small and disappears in a distant crowd of fishermen, she thinks of how much the life of an island is about watching for those who arrive and dreaming of those who depart. About waiting, sometimes forever.
Madame Rose Rakotomalala and Shay’s other friends on the island are of the opinion that Leandro has fathered no more children in Madagascar. But in the following days Shay gets jumpy whenever she hears visitors arriving at the Red House; she has visions of an army of gorgeous bastards pouring into her garden. She tries to avoid places where she might run into Harena, whose face grows more and more piteously crestfallen as the weeks pass with no word from Giustinia. One morning in September, just before Shay leaves for Italy, she sees the girl at the Fleur des Îles, heavily made up and dressed in a theatrical Comoran lamba and headdress, deep in conversation with a quartet of South African tourists. Clearly she has thrown herself wholeheartedly into her money-changing, and she nods to Shay with haughty indifference.
Back home in Milan, Shay at last sees Giustinia. And, after some excited talk about a poetry festival in Johannesburg, she informs Shay, “I finally got in touch with Leandro’s sister, and the news is bad. Leandro is dead—has been dead for a year, though this is the first I’ve heard of it. Overdose or aids—though they’re very vague about it. There must have been a funeral, but when a family like that wants to keep things quiet . . . It’s as if he died ten years ago.”
“Did you tell his sister about Harena and the boy?”
“When I told her, she just laughed. She reminded me that, before they shipped him off to Madagascar, Leandro spent a year in the Caribbean, skippering in the Islas los Roques. She said that, over the past few years, the family has had letters from a pair of Venezuelans claiming to be his children.”
Shay breaks in, “But there is no doubt that these two kids are his!”
“Yes, but what exactly does one do? Arm them with lawyers, and fly them to Rome for DNA tests that they can use to lay siege to relatives who will never accept them? And for what? Between you and me, that family hasn’t got anything left. Just land that is all tied up with taxes and entailments, and some sculptures of Popes that no one wants, and acres of architecture that costs too much to restore. Oh, and titles. They have titles to spare.”
Shay envisions a Princess Harena changing money at the Fleur des Îles, and a Prince Didier, with his aristocrat’s hands, dismembering truck engines in Mahajanga. Madagascar has its own kings and noblemen, whose polysyllabic names lie deeply rooted in the historical conquests and ancient migrations of each tribe, but none of those revered Indian Ocean pedigrees belongs by birthright to either of the half-Italian children. And, on the tourist island of Anjavavy, what would a hereditary Roman certificate of rank be, without money to back it up, but a meaningless piece of rubbish, another plastic bag blowing down the beach?
“They could send something—pay for education!” Shay persists.
“Believe me. They will do nothing.”
Giustinia and Shay look fiercely at each other, aware that they are so indignant over the neglect of Leandro’s progeny because they feel guilty about their own role in stirring up false hope: in bringing that tremulous, starry look to Harena’s eyes, and spurring Didier to travel for days over land and sea for nothing.
They sketch a plan to raise the situation with the Italian and Malagasy consuls, and they both send letters to which no answers come. And so bureaucracy performs its traditional task of transmogrifying action into inaction, and the two women lose themselves in their own busy lives.
At Christmas, when Shay and Senna travel to Madagascar, Shay is pregnant with their first child. This makes her the center of attention, but she still keeps up with the gossip, and the first thing she hears is that Harena has married a half-Chinese musician, who has taken her to Mauritius, where his band plays in the smaller clubs and hotels. It is a love match, and Harena is said to be always dressed up and much admired, but drinking more than ever and doing hard drugs. Shay is told that, when some visiting Italian finally gave Harena the news of her father’s death, she flung bottles, clawed her own face, and screamed that it wasn’t true; that even now she talks about Leandro as if he were coming to fetch her. Her husband is patient with—maybe even proud of—what he calls her European behavior, but people on Anjavavy say that she is possessed. Nothing good, they say, will come of her.
As for Harena’s half brother, Didier, the phone number he gave Shay is out of service, and no one can discover his whereabouts in Mahajanga or Morondava, though there can’t be many mechanics like him. So the lost heirs who came into Shay’s life are just as suddenly gone.
Around the same time that Harena got married, the murderer who had been cutting off heads was caught hiding out in the cane. He was a lunatic from Toamasina, a Betsimisaraka dockworker of fearful strength, whose whole family perished in the catastrophic floods of a few years back. He was, they say, obsessed with the idea of chasing vazaha out of Madagascar, of eliminating the rich Europeans and Indians who were offending the spirits of the ancestors and who for so long had plundered the wealth of the country. His twisted method was to kill Malagasy men who worked for the foreigners. But he had no chance to expound on this in a trial, or even to languish for more than a day in the medieval hell of Anjavavy’s prison, because on his way to the courthouse he was seized by a mob of islanders and promptly lynched, torn to pieces, burned, and cast into the sea.
Shay’s neighbor Madame Rose and the staff at the Red House all have a gentle air of pitying the murderer as a man cursed by madness, and placidly seem to accept the idea that justice has been served. With no newspapers to pick up the story, and with both criminal and victims at the bottom of the social scale, talk of the drama soon fades away.
Shay herself cannot help associating the unspeakable murders with the plight of Harena and Didier. But is it a plight? Wrong was certainly done. By miserable Leandro, and by his stony-hearted family. But also by Giustinia and Shay, with their frivolous intervention—they were like magpies who settle on cattle and peck open wounds.
During the next years, as more hotels are built and charter flights arrive from Rome and from Paris, prosperity steals over the island like a gilded mist, and pale half-European babies become a more common sight in the villages and on the beaches. Some of them are loved, legitimized, and even taken away to live comfortable lives in France and Italy; others grow up amid conflict and squalor. The situation of Harena and Didier, no longer unusual, fades into the constantly rewoven fabric of gossip and fantasies that makes up island history.
By this time, Shay and Senna have a small son and daughter of their own, who, being half Italian and half African-American, are often, during their holidays on the island, mistaken for mixed-race Malagasy children. With the births of Roby and Augustina, Shay suddenly knows the crushing force of that incomparable love, which, when the parents are from different worlds, brings with it all the shadows of historical conflict, in custom and color and speech.
Darlings of fortune, adored by their Italian and their American grandparents, Shay’s children grow up fluent in two languages. They are at home in Milan and in her native city of Oakland, and also in Madagascar, where they pick up rudimentary French and Sakalava dialect as they splash in the warm Anjavavy waters. From the kids they play with on Rokely Beach, they grow used to hearing lurid stories of sorcerers and ghosts—even the horrific tale of the head-hunter—and, because the disgraceful misadventures of foreigners are the villagers’ entertainment, they absorb the details of intricate scandals as well.
Buried somewhere amid all the other unsuitable anecdotes that her son and daughter bring home, Shay suspects, is a distorted account of the Leandro story, but she is certainly not going to bring it to light.
Sometimes she sits at her little writing table at the end of the garden and from the deep tamarind shade watches Roby and Augustina at play on the dazzling sand with a horde of village and tourist children, the hollering crowd expanding and contracting with algorithmic logic, like a flock of starlings, as they splash in the waves, play raboka, race hermit crabs, or draw mysterious labyrinths in the sand for the island version of hopscotch. Her son and daughter are always the focus of her vigilance, with their wild hair burned brassy gold, their faces bearing the stamp of distant continents; children healthy and loved, who play in front of the house of wealth that they will inherit; who, in short, have everything. And from time to time, as Shay watches them, she’ll unavoidably envision a boy and a girl who are their shadow twins: Didier and Harena, the beautiful children who have almost nothing. And then she holds a guilty circular conversation with herself, a kind of call-and-response.
“What more could we do?”
“We did what we could.”
“What did they need?”
“They needed to be found. Of course.”
“Was that our job?”
“Who knows if it was?”
“We could have tried harder.”
“We did what we could.”
Like a lullaby or a nursery rhyme, the sequence of excuses blends into the voices of the kids on the beach. But this is one song Shay doesn’t sing aloud. She is well aware that, on the journey toward separation that is life with even the best-loved children, it is all too easy to lose their respect. ♦
An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.
No comments:
Post a Comment