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
