But Senna, privately, remains obsessed. He feels, somehow, that the house is a task he has to complete before he can properly embark on this second marriage. He travels back and forth from Italy to Madagascar and, on a business trip to Hong Kong, fills a container with old Macau furniture and has it shipped to the island. He hires an unemployed Greek hotel manager named Kristos to act as foreman for the construction and, later, to run the place. In the back of his mind, he holds an evolving image of his creation: the lofty framework of the roof rising bare as a giant hoopskirt between the hills and the ocean. Lilliputian figures of palm thatchers clamber nimbly over the wooden ribs, filling in the spaces.
For her part, Shay is distracted by love, by marriage, by remapping career plans. Her thoughts are overwhelmed by the whole new direction of her future—a circumstance she is aware that she courted years earlier, when she began to focus her studies on Black expatriate writers like William Demby, and came to Rome for dissertation research. Now she, too, has chosen the expatriate path, and in this whirlwind of change the idea of a connection to a construction site far away near the Tropic of Capricorn is too much to contemplate. Italy is enough of a challenge, with its labyrinthine family dynamics, its sunlit surfaces concealing shadowy Catholic taboos. She assumes that her relation to Madagascar will simply be an extension of the European culture she is learning to negotiate; part of the custom—slightly shocking to industrious Americans—of long vacations, the idle existence of the watering place, the villeggiatura. In her early view of this new life, Naratrany features simply as a decorative detail: a wallpaper print, like an exotic toile de Jouy.
Only Senna’s mother, a sturdy, good-humored widow, reveling in prosperity after a youth spent stitching rice sacks, sees the connection between the amiable, brown-skinned American professoressa her son has presented her as a second daughter-in-law and the property he has acquired in hot, brown, and heathen Africa. Like many Italians, she has few qualms about race and quickly grows fond of Shay, who impresses her as ladylike, if a bit high-strung; but, knowing her boy, she predicts that things will not go easily for his new wife—as things will not go smoothly with that wasteful and unnecessary vacation villa he has built in the jungle at the dangerous ends of the earth. It’s the fault of those Salgari books, she thinks, and she’s right. But she keeps her mouth shut.
4.
“Look what a palace I built for you!” boasts Senna, when Shay first sets eyes on the Red House.
It is July in the late nineties, before there are direct charter flights from Italy to Naratrany. Husband and wife, married six months, have made the overnight haul from Milan to Paris, then Paris to Antananarivo, the capital in the rugged interior of Madagascar. Awaiting their connecting flight to the coast, they spend a day and a night in an old French colonial hotel, their moods cast down by the cold up-country climate. The air is full of history and ghosts there in the City of the Thousand, sacred highland seat of the Merina kings and queens, ancient scene of sanguinary clashes with religious heretics and intrusive Europeans. Though the streets pullulate with crowds and decrepit vehicles, there is an otherworldliness to the place, with its stark azure skies, the stone arches of its ruined palace, its brick houses stacked along the hillsides like toy blocks, its beggar children gazing through blowing dust with the shining eyes of angels. Shay studies the faces around her, with their mixture of Asian and African traits, and feels that she is somewhere unlike any other place on earth: a city aloof, melancholy, and—despite its decay and festering poverty—emanating a strange, secret purity.
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
