Lost Hearts in Italy
Red Island House
Sarah Phillips
The Packet War
I am a big house seen from afar
Not even a whole crowd can take it apart
but if they do, it takes revenge.
And when those from across the sea catch sight of me
I add them to my servants.
—“Ibonia,” traditional epic of Madagascar, translated by Lee Haring
There are houses you don’t want, that, nevertheless, enter your life and bring with them other lives, whole other worlds. There are countries you visit that lay hold of you and don’t let go, even if you diligently attempt to remain a tourist. These thoughts have been incubating in the mind of Shay Senna ever since she—a Black American woman with scant interest in the continent of Africa except as a near-mythical motherland—unexpectedly and unwillingly became mistress of the Red House, a sprawling household in northwestern Madagascar.
It is because of the big house and its bad fortune that she is at present in a dreamlike situation, hurrying under the calescent subequatorial sun through the back lanes of a fishermen’s shantytown on the island of Naratrany, in pursuit of a tiny Sakalava girl in a white satin gown.
In the light-soaked stillness of the hottest noontime hour, when mongrel dogs lie flat as puddles in patches of shade, the barefoot child, who looks like an eerie carnival figure in that glaring dress with its flounces and ribbons, skips in and out of sight through a maze of tottering bamboo huts. Occasionally she turns her little braided head and makes a cheeky, beckoning motion with a spindly brown arm as she guides Shay and Shay’s head housekeeper, Bertine la Grande, to the home of the man referred to, usually in whispers, as the Neighbor.
The tall, stately Bertine, also barefoot, also Sakalava, leads the way. Dressed in a sweeping print lamba, her geometrically knotted hair hidden by a big, sun-faded newsboy hat that gives her a curiously regal air, she chuckles softly each time the small white apparition flashes into sight, then treads on casually as if engaged in an everyday errand.
Shay stumbles along in her wake, hampered by the long skirt she was told to wear, and hobbled as well by her American common sense, which is struggling with the awareness that she has crossed a threshold into the deep unknown. Her woven shoulder bag, concealing a wad of ariary bills and the small gift Bertine suggested, bangs against her side, as she tries not to think of the fact that she is seeking out the Neighbor, a notorious conjurer, in hopes that he can lift the spell on her house.
2.
How has this peculiar quest come about? You could say it is because of something else that hasn’t come about: the housewarming ceremony that Shay’s husband, Senna, a rich but stingy Italian businessman, neglects to hold when he finishes building his fantasy vacation residence on Naratrany. So tightfisted is Senna that not even one zebu bull is slaughtered for the local villagers, not one festive step danced, not one glass of rum poured on the ground for thirsty ancestors, when the last thatch has been laid on the big villa he constructed on what was formerly Colonel Andrianasolo’s lot on Finoana Beach.
Naratrany, a very minor part of Madagascar, is a small lush island with a central crater that gives it from afar the look of a squashed green fedora. Framed by coral reefs, it is one of a chain of ancient fumaroles that in the Tertiary period arose to become satellites to the huge main island. Though defined by cartographers as part of Africa, Madagascar really belongs only to itself, having developed its independent character over the millions of years since the primeval continent of Gondwana broke apart and abandoned the shield-shaped landmass in the sea between Mozambique and India. The topography of the country ranges from deserts of lunar desolation to swathes of emerald rice fields; from allées of baobabs to impenetrable forested uplands; but its coastal fringe of palmy islets is perhaps loveliest of all. In a letter from the early 1900s, a French priest (and amateur poet) stationed on Naratrany describes it as “un petit morceau du paradis, tombé des cieux.” He notes as well that the name Naratrany seems to mean “broken” or “wounded,” though it is unclear whether this refers to a forgotten battle or the island’s craterous shape.
Located on an ancient Indian Ocean trade route, the tiny dot of land has for centuries been a magnet for explorers, missionaries, pirates, and plunderers of all descriptions. It is the territory of the Sakalava, one of Madagascar’s nineteen peoples, a linchpin in that martial tribe’s vast kingdom, which once covered all western Madagascar. Sakalava lived on Naratrany before the earliest Indian merchants arrived; were present with their zebu cattle when the pirates Tew and Avery sailed through; were there when their powerful rivals the Merina, aided by British guns, swept down from the highlands to conquer the coast; were in residence when France annexed all Madagascar as a colony, and still there in 1960 when the colony won independence.
This history connects to the story of the Red House, since the swathe of beachfront that Colonel Andrianasolo sells to Senna belonged, a century earlier, to a Malagasy nobleman, a cousin of the Sakalava queen. A now-forgotten quarrel cut short the life of this gentleman and one of his retainers, and their remains still rest discreetly in a far corner of the property, concealed by the roots of a huge kapok tree.
Colonel Andrianasolo, a Merina whose father snapped up the property just after independence, knows all about the hidden graves when, after intense bargaining with the wily Italian, he signs the certificat d’achat. But the colonel prudently keeps silent about the unusual feature of the terrain. He only expresses a neighborly hope—Andrianasolo vacations on the next beach over, in a properly exorcized 1970s bungalow—that Senna’s future housewarming celebration will include the proper formalities, and the
