“Look what a palace I built you!” Senna makes his proclamation now, throwing his hands open wide in an impresario’s grand gesture.
And Shay is surprised to feel her breath catch in her throat. Conflicting emotions seize her: a flare of feminine pride that Senna should have tried so hard to impress her, but also alarm. She realizes that she’s been hoping the house wouldn’t be beautiful—has vaguely felt that it would be easier to accept if it were tasteless: overblown, like a reception hall at a tacky beach resort, or cramped, like a badly proportioned summer cottage—the kind of place you end up loving like an annoying relative.
Instead she sees a lofty thatched roof peak, with something impressive about its isolation and its size, taller than the tallest palms that fringe the long bay. Shay recognizes the harmony of the proportions, and in the same moment feels that something about the place is all wrong. Not its architecture, but its mere existence is an error in a way she can’t yet define, but which goes far beyond being an emblem of wealth in a land of poverty. What she does know, immediately, is that—of course—it was never built for her. The reality is that here, in this remote corner of the world, her new husband has raised a monument to an unseemly private fantasy. And now that she has seen it, she somehow shares the blame.
Into her mind comes the opening line of Out of Africa, a book that she has both loved for Blixen’s lapidary prose style and deplored for the grandiose paternalism that shapes the author’s vision. “I had a farm in Africa…” As a college freshman, eager to establish herself as a cultural warrior, she once wrote a passionate essay describing those few words as the rallying cry of imperialist oppression. For what does had mean, eighteen-year-old Shay typed furiously, but the act of rape?
Now these thoughts dissolve as Senna leans over the gearshift and hugs her uncomfortably against the pockets of his camouflage vest. “Well, what do you think?” he demands.
“È bellissima,” Shay tells him. Because that is the truth, and for now other truths are unsayable.
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
