“Be careful,” warns his Calabrian friend, an old Africa hand. “Places like this aren’t ever as simple as they look! Especially here. These people are part Bantu and part Indonesian, and part something else that is just pure strangeness. You can never tell where you are with them.”
Of course, Senna knows nothing about Madagascar, not one thing about the country’s epic geological past, nothing about the quirky evolutionary journey of its fabled wildlife, or the nineteen tribes and their language with its recondite Swahili-Polynesian roots. Like many Italians, he adores the tropics, and over years of growing prosperity has vacationed with his family and friends in the Bahamas, Thailand, Bali, and Tahiti.
He sees these places of coralline seas as a single landscape, flat as a Rousseau painting. A backdrop against which to bring to life his youthful adventure fantasies, rooted in his love for the pulp novels of Emilio Salgari, the best-selling nineteenth-century bard of the exotic. Salgari never actually traveled out of provincial Italy, but his fevered descriptions of Asian, African, and South American jungles and lagoons are as detailed as encyclopedias can make them. The author’s swashbuckling heroes, who battle headhunters in ancient temples, commandeer Moghul treasure ships, and rescue swooning heroines from seraglios, fired the imaginations of generations of boys in Latin countries—boys including Gabriel García Márquez, and Che Guevara. And Senna.
Added to these fantasies are yarns he has heard of Libertalia, a seventeenth-century colony said to have been founded in Madagascar by an idealistic crew of European pirates. Legend describes Libertalia as a raffish utopian settlement, in which all property was shared and all license allowed. What with dusky concubines, commodious bamboo residential huts, communal chests of gold, freed African slaves, and high-minded gentlemen buccaneers who frequently discoursed on the rights of man, Libertalia seems to have offered everything. But did it ever really exist? Senna likes to think it did.
“Think what you want,” says the Calabrian. “But true or false, the old story ends badly. The local Malagasy tribesmen get sick of the settlers and wipe out the colony in one night. Not a stick or a bone left. Happens over and over again in places like this.”
But Senna ignores this implied warning. The Calabrian, he reflects, hasn’t even had the brains to hang on to one cent of his family’s prewar coffee fortune.
Senna himself is a man who gets things done fast. He’s quite used to skipping cultural niceties and clinching overnight business deals with foreigners—often Chinese or Russian—using the internationally respected language of brutal haggling. Thus, he gains the startled admiration of Colonel Andrianasolo, and in record time has in hand an exquisitely hand-copied French-Malagasy deed of purchase for a swathe of beachfront with rice paddies and cane fields behind it.
Finoana Beach is not, as he first thought, empty. Behind the palms are two villages, Finoana and Renirano, full of fishermen and cane workers, and a whole network of life, complete with markets, a tiny mosque, a Catholic church, and a ramshackle French-built elementary school. To Senna, this means only that he’ll have more men for construction, at weekly wages that would barely pay for coffee for workmen back in Italy.
So the house goes up with almost magical swiftness. The terrain has not been built on before, but has been extensively planted: coconut, mango, jackfruit, tamarind, banana, as well as flowers: jasmine, frangipani, hibiscus, ylang-ylang. The pleasure Senna derives from this profusion of color and fragrances leads him to christen the place Villa Gioia. Though he knows it’s a commonplace name, better suited to a second-rate pensione in Rimini, he reckons it will be the only one on this island.
He alone designs the house, though he works out a deal with a local construction kingpin, a Karan Indian from Diego Suarez, whose fleet of boutres, fat wooden schooners, swing into the bay to deliver concrete as well as timber from Madagascar’s shrinking forests. Senna is dizzied by the infinite possibilities offered by using First World money in a Third World country, one of the poorest on earth. Like a djinn out of the Arabian Nights, he summons up a structure of fanciful grandiosity, a pastiche of tropical styles from around the world. There is a soaring peaked roof suggesting a palm-thatched circus tent, inspired by the dramatic huts of Sumba, Indonesia; an interior with one end dominated by a grandly swung double staircase, like that in an Antiguan plantation house, rising to a mezzanine with a curving lineup of bedrooms; a sweep of open-plan ground floor separated from a wide veranda only by tall jalousies, like a certain inn in Trincomalee. At the garden entrance stand tree-trunk pillars carved with leering primitive faces—copied, Senna cheerfully admits, from a ride at Florida’s Disney World.
Like most big tropical residences, the place is a compound: breezeways lead to a separate kitchen and other outbuildings, including a bungalow for the house manager. But most striking is the expanse of floor that a visitor faces when entering. This floor is concrete: sanded, stained with many coats of iron-oxide paint, which, waxed and polished, acquires a warm maroon hue that glows in the shade of the cavernous roof almost like something alive. Because of it, nearby villagers immediately begin to call Villa Gioia ny trano
