“Mama, what did you do?” Lele comes running up to me from where he has been squatting naked on the beach, playing with two small boys from the village. His legs and backside and little penis are covered with sand. I see the boys staring after him, one holding a toy they’ve been squabbling over: a rough wooden model of a truck, without wheels, tied with a piece of string to a stick. “Ismail says you hit a lady.”
Word has already spread along the beach, which is like a stage where a different variety show goes on every hour of the day. The set acts are the tides, which determine the movements of fishing boats, pirogues, Zodiacs, and sailboats. There is always action on the sand: women walk up and down with bundles on their heads; bands of ragged children dig clams at low tide, or launch themselves into the waves at high tide to surf with a piece of old timber; yellow dogs chase chickens and fight over shrimp shells; palm branches crash down on corrugated-iron roofs; girls with lacy dresses and bare sandy shanks parade to Mass; the little mosque opens and shuts its creaky doors; boys play soccer, kicking a plastic water bottle; babies howl; sunburnt tourist couples argue and reconcile. Gossip flashes up and down with electronic swiftness.
I sit up in the water and grab Lele, and kiss him all over while he splashes and struggles to get away. “Yes, that’s right,” I tell him. It’s the firm, didactic voice I use when we’ve turned off the Teletubbies videos and I am playing the ideal parent. “I did hit a lady,” I say. “She needed hitting.” I, the mother who instructs her cross-cultural child in tolerance and nonviolence. Lele has a picture book called Brothers and Sisters Around the World, full of illustrations of cookie-cutter figures of various colors, holding hands across continents. All people belong to one family, it teaches. All oceans are the same ocean.
Michel, who has watched the whole scene, comes and tells me that in all his past visits to the island he’s never seen anything like it. He’s worried. The women fight among themselves, or they fight with their men for sleeping with the tourists, he says. But no foreign woman has ever got mixed up with them. He talks like an anthropologist about loss of face and vendetta. “We might get run out of here,” he says nervously.
I tell him to relax, that absolutely nothing will happen. Where do I get this knowledge? It has sifted into me from the water, the air. So, as we planned, we go off spearfishing over by Nosy Komba, where the coral grows in big pastel poufs like furniture in a Hollywood bedroom of the fifties. We find a den of rock lobster and shoot two, and take them back to Jean-Claude’s house for Hadijah to cook. Waiting for the lobster, we eat about fifty small oysters the size of mussels and shine flashlights over the beach in front of the veranda, which is crawling with crabs. Inside, Lele is snoring adenoidally under a mosquito net. The black sky above is alive with falling stars. Michel keeps looking at me and shaking his head.
Hadijah comes out bearing the lobster magnificently broiled with vanilla sauce. To say she has presence is an understatement. She got married when she was thirteen, and is now, after eight children, an important personage, the matriarch of a vast and prosperous island clan. She and I have got along fine ever since she realized that I wasn’t going to horn in on her despotic rule over Jean-Claude’s house, or say anything about the percentage she skims off the marketing money. She has a closely braided head and is as short and solid as a boulder—on the spectrum of Madagascar skin colors well toward the darkest. This evening she is showing off her wealth by wearing over her pareu a venerable Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. She puts down the lobster, sets her hands on her hips, and looks at me, and my heart suddenly skips a beat. Hers, I realize, is the only opinion I care about. “Oh, Madame,” she says, flashing me a wide smile and shaking her finger indulgently, as if I’m a child who has been up to mischief. I begin breathing again. “Oh, Madame!”
“Madame has a quick temper,” Michel says in a placating voice, and Hadijah throws her head back and laughs till the Guns N’ Roses logo shimmies.
“She is right!” she exclaims. “Madame a raison! She’s a good wife!”
Next morning our neighbor PierLuigi pulls up to the house in his dust-covered Renault pickup. PierLuigi is Italian, and back in Italy has a title and a castle. Here he lives in a bamboo hut when he is not away leading a shark-hunting safari to
