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| Photo by Andres Serrano |
The maids and gardeners rush to separate the struggling old vazaha while other people stop and stare, but with a notable lack of astonishment. Everybody up and down Finoana Beach knows the history of the trouble and the name of the woman behind it.
Not long ago, the combatants were close friends. Pianon and Floristella: both Italians who have been in Madagascar since the early years of independence, both men of dignity and substance, as much as they can be in that libertine island atmosphere where foreigners’ souls can rot as quickly as a bunch of soft-skinned bananas. Both speak fluent Malagasy, highland and coastal dialects. They’ve been on Naratrany long enough for the islanders to have christened them with fondly mocking nicknames. Pianon is Valiha, the word for a tall thin twanging bamboo musical instrument, and Floristella is Sakav, meaning, simply, “food.”
Pianon is a notary from Verona, a widower who dresses in elegant shirts and trousers tailored, colonial-style, from linen of an archaic thickness. He has cropped white hair, a hatchet nose, and the intense yet ascetic air of erudition that is the unmistakable sign of a Jesuit education. A passionate amateur ethnologist, he spends his free time interviewing missionaries and village headmen for a monograph he is writing on the Sakalava royal family. His job as the live-in bookkeeper and rental manager at the Red House is undeniably beneath him, yet he has grown attached to the space and the beauty of the big villa, which he often has to himself outside of peak vacation season, and where he has built a library. Like everyone else, he is fond of his boss, the boisterous and decidedly nonintellectual Senna; Shay he admires for her degree of learning, which he was surprised to find in an American woman, and he sometimes invites her along on his research expeditions.
No one could differ more from Pianon than Floristella, a Sicilian baron of fallen fortunes who carries his huge belly with the complacent ease of a pasha. In his adventurous youth, he was a famous yachtsman and deep-sea diver, whose prowess and seductive charm ensnared the hearts of beauties from Capri to Zanzibar. Although riches, youth, and health have vanished, leaving him to a frugal pensioner’s existence on Naratrany, he still has a grand manner, which has made him an island personage. His aquiline profile—noble despite his two chins—and his silver crest of brilliantined hair are a landmark on Finoana Beach, where he holds court daily from the porch of his tiny bungalow, which adjoins the grounds of the Red House.
There, ensconced in a sagging director’s chair, surrounded by a motley array of cats and dogs and even a three-legged pet tortoise, he contemplates the tides and the changing skies over the Mozambique Channel. He exchanges greetings with passersby, from village children to hotel owners, while perusing documents or eating heaping plates of pasta prepared by his faithful housekeeper, Marianne. He naps, smokes endless cigarettes, reads thrillers, and doles out wages to the Sakalava workmen who, in starts and stops linked to the fluctuating state of his finances, have for years been at work on a grandiose extension to his bungalow, which he secretly hopes will outshine the Red House.
When Pianon first came to work for the Sennas, the two neighbors established a habit of meeting up on Floristella’s porch in the cool of the early morning to drink powerful Sicilian coffee from Floristella’s battered pot. For a pleasant hour, as the sun rose and the fishermen set out in their pirogues and Floristella’s thin gray kitten purred on Pianon’s bony, linen-covered knee, they traded island gossip. Shay, who liked to take fins and a mask and swim the length of Finoana Bay before breakfast, often paused far out in the water to observe the two old men on the porch of the little bungalow beside her own big house. They had a look of casual harmony that was in keeping with the early-morning hush, the long shadows of palms and casuarinas that lay along the immaculate curve of beach. When Shay came, dripping, out of the water, they’d call out greetings and offer her coffee, but she never wanted to disrupt their modest but perfect intimacy.
The woman who did break up the idyll was Noelline. For years, she was Floristella’s secretary and mistress, filling the gap left by his wife, who long before had grown weary of the tedium of Madagascar and returned to Trapani, where she awaited her husband’s twice-yearly visits. Noelline, twenty-six and childless, was no longer young by island standards and, in a land where lovely women were as abundant as grains of sand, had never been considered a beauty, though she had an almost preposterously voluptuous body, a product of her mixed Sakalava and Antankarana background. The daughter of a seamstress and a ferryman, she had a demure wide face, its teak surface roughened by outbreaks of tiny pimples, a high forehead, and bright, shallow-set eyes that missed nothing. She kept her hair short and stylish, sometimes enhancing it with a waist-length tail of beaded Chinese braids, and her enviable wardrobe consisted of tight imported jeans and dresses, purchased by Floristella.
Unlike most of the village women who became embroiled with foreign men, Noelline was educated—she had completed two years at the lycée run by the sugar refinery at Ankazobe. She could type and use a computer, and spoke French and Italian. Beyond her intelligence, her undeniable energy, and a reputed genius for sex, her greatest talents were ones she shared with most resourceful wives and mistresses: an inconspicuous but relentless persistence, the ability to bide her time, to cling without being obvious, and never to show offense.
Eventually, Floristella entrusted her with the keys to his bungalow, the secrets of his defunct business exporting medicinal jungle herbs, the erratic construction work on his property, and the care and the pleasures of his swollen, diabetic body. Noelline didn’t move in with him but lived a mile away in a rented two-room cinder-block house—luxurious by village standards, and paid for, of course, by Floristella—set among palms and thornbushes in one of the warren-like settlements that sprawled messily off the only paved road in Finoana.
Each morning, she buzzed up to Floristella’s bungalow on a battered motorbike, offering a cordial but slightly condescending greeting to Marianne, who pounded laundry and cleaned fish in the small trodden-sand yard by the sea. In the course of the day, Noelline wrote Floristella’s letters, gave him his insulin injections, climbed nimbly astride his big belly during the siesta hour, and sometimes lingered after sunset on his lamplit porch, patiently listening to his fantastical plans for rebuilding his fortune. She never spent the night.
To Floristella’s many friends, and especially to Pianon, she was quietly respectful. She absorbed Italian idioms with rapt attention, and laughed appropriately when the two men chatted on the porch. Occasionally, she typed a document for Pianon, and sometimes, in the tone of a schoolmistress, translated for him an obscure term in Sakalava dialect, or explained some custom, like why it was fady for certain young girls to eat chicken.
The villagers knew that Noelline had her own giambillys, or lovers on the side, notably a handsome cabdriver from Saint Grimaud, a métis who was said to beat his penniless French mother. However, the young woman jealously guarded her position with the Sicilian. In the village, she acquired the title of Madame Floristella, much to the annoyance of his wife back in Trapani, who vowed not to return to the island until Floristella had discarded Noelline.
When Senna and Shay drove to the market at Saint Grimaud, they often caught sight of the portly Floristella, conferring with some sous-official on the broken, weedy courthouse steps, as Noelline, in tight jeans and pointed high heels, stood demurely in the background. “There she is, that sly baggage!” Senna invariably said, and Shay as always protested.
“Why call her that—she’s just doing her job! How is she different from any other island girl?”
“Because the other little hussies have kind hearts, but she’s a troublemaker, that one. She’ll be the death of old Flori, wait and see.” Senna loved to rattle his American wife with a show of cynical wisdom where Madagascar was concerned, and Shay was generally amused. Still, she felt that, as a woman of color, she had to express solidarity with Noelline. What would she herself do in the same circumstances?
The fact was, though, that nobody on the island seemed to like Noelline, and no one could explain her unpopularity, except to say that, although she wasn’t beautiful, she gave herself airs. Bertine la Grande, the housekeeper, simply observed to Shay, “Elle n’est pas bien, cette fille.” Bertine had a Manichean vision of the world as divided into “bien” and “pas bien,” which had little to do with conventional morality: many an island prostitute was described by Bertine as “bien.” Shay understood that, if Bertine defined Noelline, who was from the same village as she was and whom she had known since childhood, as “pas bien,” she was referring to something other than the girl’s ambitious seductiveness—a deep flaw in her nature that was visible only to someone with the same origins. Yet, with a strange kind of loyalty, Bertine went no further in criticizing Noelline, or in trying to thwart her actions; instead, she stood back with a fatalistic air, as if things simply had to unroll as they did.
And how did Shay feel about Noelline? Well, if she was honest with herself, she knew that her show of sisterly sympathy was hypocritical, because she, too, couldn’t stand the girl. Noelline greeted her meekly with a bland smile whenever their paths crossed, but beneath her politeness, in those shallow-set eyes, as brown as coffee beans, flickered a powerful current of envy and hostility.
The rivalry of Floristella and Pianon began when Floristella suffered a heart attack, as was inevitable, one hot January night. Alerted by the night watchmen, Pianon called Dr. Pau and, with the help of the doctor and Madame Rose, had the Sicilian transferred by helicopter to the hospital on Reunion Island. His wife and sons rushed there from Trapani, and later carried him back home.
Noelline, Marianne, and the groundskeepers were left in charge of Floristella’s Madagascar affairs: his bungalow, his motley array of pets, his keys and documents, and the weedy construction site out back. As he recovered, Floristella—forgetting the lessons of history, and his own extensive knowledge of women—asked his friend Pianon to keep an eye on things, including Noelline. As Senna would say, any fool could have anticipated what would happen, with Floristella absent for so many months. His convalescence was astutely extended by his wife, who was pleased to have her elderly husband out of the infectious atmosphere of whores and decayed colonial dreams that hung like a fever mist over the island of Naratrany.
From Madagascar, Pianon called to ask whether Floristella would mind if Noelline helped him with some complicated paperwork at the Red House.
Bertine la Grande later described to Shay a scene that made it clear how things were progressing. It was circumcision season, and all over the island groups of four- or five-year-old boys had undergone the ceremonial procedure. Three days after the operation, Noelline brought a band of little Finoana village boys, her cousins and nephews, down to the beach in front of the Red House, to wash in the sea. They were lured into the water, as tradition prescribes, with singing and splashing games. The naked boys winced and squealed as the salt water stung their wounds, and Noelline led them in playing.
She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, the kind that tourists wear, a bikini that left little about her large breasts and her broad thighs to the imagination. And she was frolicking conspicuously, as proper village girls never do—decorous girls who enter the water modestly dressed to wash themselves or to fish with a piece of sheeting. “On dirait qu’elle dansait! ” Bertine said sourly. She meant dancing like the whores at the bars near the port, who could move their asses like turbines while balancing beer bottles on their heads.
Bertine saw that Noelline was aiming her movements in a specific direction, and then saw Pianon’s tall, bony linen-clad figure emerge from the garden of the Red House onto the beach. Pianon, who rarely went onto the sand and never swam, approached with his crane’s gait to call out to them, perhaps to make some scholarly inquiry into the chants and songs used in the games. But Bertine saw how his eyes latched on to the nearly naked young woman in the circle of splashing children. As if he were standing hungry in front of a market stall without a coin to his name.
Pianon and Noelline. Both lonely people who, in a different situation, in a place less strung about with caste, could have been openly together from the start. Pianon had lost a wife to cancer and his only daughter to a drug overdose, and was not inclined to go back to Verona to rejoin the small accounting firm he had once run with his brother. Alone among the foreign adventurers and losers washed up on the shores of Naratrany, he had never annexed an ambitious teen-age beauty as a mistress.
Noelline had been cut off from clan and tribe by her curious unpopularity and by her attachment to Floristella, who had devoured her freshest youth without ever offering to live with her, have a child, or buy her a house of her own. Floristella, whose noble forebears were said to have hunted peasants for sport on the slopes of Mt. Etna, had—besides his bungalow and useless construction site—only a crumbling sea-girt family palace in Trapani, a tenacious wife, and a mountain of debt from frivolous investments both in Africa and in Europe. But Pianon was unattached and had an Italian pension, in addition to his position at the Red House.
So, while Floristella recuperated back in Sicily, Noelline began to spend afternoons working on the computer in Pianon’s office at the Red House, and appeared at Pianon’s side in the pickup truck when he made his trips to the Banque Commerciale de Madagascar, to the customs office, or to the Commune Urbaine.
Noelline, coming and going on her motorbike, had always had a certain camaraderie with the small army of maids and laundresses who maintained the Red House for Senna’s family and the paying guests. Some were girls she had grown up with, and, like Bertine la Grande, they knew exactly what was going on. Noelline and her seamstress mother were even seen several times in the Red House kitchen. Everyone understood that, in the time-honored manner, Noelline was using magic to entice Pianon, but whether it was simply an aphrodisiac or a love philtre that she was adding to his food remained unclear.
By June, when the cold season began and the village infants bound to their mothers’ backs wore snug crocheted caps, Floristella had been away from the island for five months. Pianon’s once clear and ironical blue eyes had acquired a submissive, almost doglike expression, and in matters of dress he had become unattractively casual, abandoning his impeccable linens for the tracksuits and safari shorts worn by most of the old rum-soused foreigners on the island.
When the Sennas arrived from Milan to spend their summer vacation at the Red House, Shay was angered to catch sight of Noelline slipping out of Pianon’s bedroom early one morning, the young woman’s usually neat hair standing on end in a way that suggested unbridled rutting. After a decade of sojourns in Madagascar, Shay had developed an ironclad poise and had learned to be astonished at nothing, but she was disappointed with Pianon, whom she’d thought might be the one old man on the island who would not embarrass himself.
“I’ll have to say something to him,” she said severely to Bertine la Grande, when the housekeeper reported that the two had been sleeping together for weeks. “This house is not a bordello!”
“I think it is useless to speak to him,” the housekeeper said. “Speak to her—la fille.”
But when Shay did take Noelline aside and, in her firmest tone, as if she were dealing with a misbehaving student, told her that certain behavior would not be tolerated, she found herself confronted with an enigma. The prow-like bosom and tiny waist, the round face under the Eartha Kitt hairdo, the coffee-bean eyes, the dulcet voice that immediately agreed—“Oui, oui, madame, c’est honteux, je suis désolée”—all barely masked the blaze of mocking hostility that Shay had sensed before. For a second, the American woman with all her privilege quailed before the Malagasy woman who had nothing but her wits.
All July and August, Shay observed the progress of the affair. Though no more nights were spent in the Red House, Noelline cleaved to Pianon’s side, even showing up in the sweaty, raucous crowd at the weekly Sunday moraingy boxing match held in the dusty arena at Betsaka Beach. (Pianon attended this popular entertainment to take notes on the ritual insults exchanged by Sakalava and Antandroy opponents.)
One afternoon, Shay returned unexpectedly from an excursion into Saint Grimaud and caught Noelline, her demure mask laid aside, leading the younger maids—it was Bertine’s day off—in loud teasing of her elderly lover. Just outside the kitchen, the girls had surrounded Pianon in a giggling, clapping, shouting ring as they demanded that he throw them a party to celebrate Italy’s World Cup win.
When Shay, carrying a basket filled with lengths of Comorean cloth, came into view, the maids scattered in all directions like ants, and Noelline darted into the office, leaving Pianon struggling to reassume his dignity. “They are young . . . high-spirited,” he mumbled to Shay, who was trying not to laugh.
“Really, Gianfilippo, you shouldn’t let them run wild like that!” she said, keeping a straight face as he stood there in his ugly warmup pants, a dull flush suffusing his cheeks.
On the one hand, the scene was hilarious: the house manager bullied by his staff, the priestly Pianon helplessly aroused by the loud, ribald female crowd around him. Shay had always amused herself by envisioning him as the arid scholar Casaubon, from “Middlemarch,” transplanted to the tropics and engrossed not in the “Key to All Mythologies” but in an endless history of the Sakalava kings. But now she thought of his quiet kindness to her children, his unswerving courtesy to her and to Senna, and felt saddened at his mislaid decorum.
“Are you sure this is all worth it?” she asked him quietly, just as her son and daughter came running up from the beach.
Pianon gave her an austere look, and replied, “Le cœur a ses raisons.”
That night in their bedroom, she said to Senna, “I think we may need to look for a new house manager soon.”
“Che cazzo! ” Senna exclaimed in annoyance, slapping aside the mosquito net and collapsing on the bed. “I was hoping he would just start chasing hookers like everyone else.”
When Floristella returned to Madagascar, in late September, it seemed as if Pianon and Noelline’s affair might die the natural death of countless illicit romances on Naratrany Island: everything buried under layers of silence, nothing remaining but a sudden opacity in the eyes of the people who knew. But the very evening of Floristella’s arrival Pianon went directly to his old friend and confessed everything.
Yielding to the frailty of the flesh and sleeping with an absent neighbor’s mistress was a forgivable lapse by the lax standards of island morality. Running off with a friend’s woman was also something that Naratrany had seen before. But confessing such an offense without any particular plan of action except declaring oneself the woman’s defender, in a vague chivalric manner, was just foolish, and this was what Pianon did. He did not declare that it was destiny, and that in Noelline he had found his dream of love (which might have been an acceptable excuse to an emotional Sicilian); instead, he took an unfortunate middle route, announcing pompously that he and Noelline had made no plans, but that in their newfound intimacy he had come to respect her even more, and did not wish for her to live a life of misery.
The foolishness of this! As Senna remarked to Shay—husband and wife were both avidly soaking up the gossip, long-distance from Milan—it left Floristella not only cuckolded but egregiously insulted, with rage and revenge his only options.
The situation was rendered more volatile by the fact that Noelline began to act erratically. She abruptly stopped her part-time work with Pianon, so as not to go anywhere near her official employer, Floristella. With him, she would have no contact, not even to tie up the loose ends of her secretarial duties.
Worse than this was that, after being the soul of discretion, she suddenly started issuing melodramatic pronouncements all over the island, telling anybody who would listen that for years she had been the Sicilian’s overworked slave, and that now she wished to be free. For the idlers at the Fleur des Îles café, who were following the situation like a soap opera, Noelline was overdoing her big moment.
Everyone knew that she had long ago offered herself to old Floristella, fighting off other girls, and that she and her mother had since then been living contentedly in the greatest luxury the impecunious Sicilian could afford. For years, he had paid the rent of the cinder-block house. He put down the money for her diploma from the lycée, and for those business courses. How else could she have got the motorbike, the satellite dish, all those shoes, and the third-rate sapphire she wore around her neck? Even now, Floristella had done the paperwork properly, and she was receiving severance pay.
Yet here she was, going on about her suffering in a manner that the gossips opined was suitable only for crazy white women. And the way she bragged about her powers of fascination over old vazaha, as if every pretty island girl didn’t have the same power between her legs! She even invented a third suitor, a rich German, who, she claimed, wanted to take her to Munich. No one believed this except the two rivals, Floristella and Pianon.
Long vanished were the days of contemplating the sunrise together over caffè ristretto. Morning and evening, Floristella sat in monumental solitude on his porch overlooking the beach, glaring at the waves while nursing his Achillean rage.
Meanwhile, Pianon stayed away from the sea, well back in the bosky garden, made discreet evening visits to Noelline in her cinder-block house, and twice took her on weekend excursions to Mahajanga. He was filled with bittersweet tenderness at her predictable appetite for fake designer purses, nine-carat-gold bangles, and the hair extensions that hung temptingly in the Indian shops of Saint Grimaud. He even bought her a twenty-four-piece dinner set painted with violets, which had been gathering dust for years on a shelf of Au Bonheur de la Maison.In between her demands for gifts and her melodramatic complaints about Floristella, Noelline made love to Pianon with an explosive intensity that he had never experienced, even as a young man. In all his years in Madagascar, he had stayed away from affairs with Malagasy women, but, in Noelline’s plaintive voice, in the touch of her cool, slightly rough skin, even in her greed, he encountered something simple, ancient, and essential that made his research into history and custom seem as unreal as a stage set. He was oddly touched by the fact that she did not even pretend to be in love with him.
Meanwhile, Floristella was overcome with jealousy. He set up a network of spies led by Marianne, and began calling Noelline on the cell phone he had bought for her in happier times. He abandoned pride and begged her to return. Even if just for an hour a day. He swore that she would never again have to give him insulin injections or toil at his laggard erections. She would not have to listen to his rambling theories on politics and genetics. She would not have to work at all: she could just sit and keep him company.
He called a dozen times a day. Finally, when, with her new outspokenness, she threatened to file a complaint with the police, he subsided into an ominous Sicilian calm. Madame Rose reported in frequent agitated phone calls that Floristella had “gone quiet, like all maniacs.” According to Madame Rose, he had been overheard musing aloud that the beach in front of his bungalow would be a perfect spot for a public flogging post, or even a gallows.
Naratrany Island was, in fact, a convenient place to commit a crime of passion. A year before, the captain of a South African schooner docked at the yacht basin had vanished after killing his first mate with a machete. A Belgian diving instructor who beat his Sakalava girlfriend had been waylaid while riding his motorcycle and had his skull bashed in with a rock. During fishing expeditions to the Îles Glorieuses, unwanted tourist wives disappeared overboard, untraceable. The forces of law were more interested in capturing sapphire smugglers than murderers. Poison was rife, as easy to sneak into food as aphrodisiacs.
It was absolutely true that Floristella had told Hassan, the owner of the Total-Kianja gas station, that he had considered the simple expedient of flinging a lighted book of matches onto the thatched roof of the Red House while Pianon was sleeping.
“But that,” the old Sicilian said to the horrified Hassan, “would be burning down a friend’s house to exterminate a rat!”
Things come to a head on that memorable November morning when Floristella storms into the Red House garden. He is brandishing an antique brass-bound walking stick that one of his progenitors acquired in Scotland, a blackened thorn meant for tramping across Hebridean grouse moors. With startling swiftness, considering his bulk, he dashes up the veranda steps and hurtles toward Pianon, who stands frozen on the wide gleaming floor before his office, wearing his own unlikely European accessory: an elegant pair of fur-lined Venetian slippers.
Maids and gardeners peer around every corner of the Red House as Floristella flings down a crumpled sheet of paper and bellows that he found some Red House business letters filed away by mistake in his private strongbox, to which only he and Noelline have the key.
“This is the final straw, you filthy traitor, you dog!” he shouts, raising the stick with both hands like a club. “I’m going to smash your skinny legs and put you in a wheelchair, where you won’t be fucking another man’s woman!”
“Let’s sit down and talk in a calm and reasonable manner,” Pianon babbles, backing away. “I’ve already told you it was a terrible, a sinful error on my part, and I apologized humbly. In the name of our old friendship, don’t act like this with the staff watching. Think of your dignity!”
“Amicizia! Dignità! ” Floristella howls. He takes a sudden swing with the walking stick at Pianon, who leaps aside with unexpected nimbleness and collides with a mahogany side table. One of Shay’s favorite earthenware lamps flies off and explodes in fragments on the floor, to a collective “Asala! ” from the assembled servants. Floristella’s housekeeper and his handyman race from next door to restrain Floristella, who flings away his stick and launches himself at Pianon, bearing the other man to the ground with his greater weight and trying to throttle him.
For a second, a ring of young dark-skinned spectators encircles the two old white men, one bony and pale, one fat and vermillion with rage. Then the Red House maids, led by Bertine la Grande, manage to detach Floristella’s grip. They pull the dishevelled Pianon to his feet and help him to a chair, and Floristella, puffing dangerously, allows himself to be walked away by Marianne and two others.
“I’ll see that you get what you deserve!” the Sicilian shouts as he is hustled past a line of banana trees. “Don’t let yourself fall asleep, not even a siesta!”
“You don’t understand,” Pianon calls, rising cautiously and hobbling to the edge of the veranda. “She’s left me!”
“Left you?” Floristella says, pausing.
“She won’t answer my calls. She won’t open her door. It’s been three days now!”
“Good for you, you dirty bastard! Enjoy what’s left of your miserable life.”
It is true, in fact, that the unpredictable Noelline has abruptly dropped the second of her elderly swains, in a fit of pique that consolidates her reputation as a girl who allows herself emotions far beyond her means.
Word has it that she broke things off with Pianon just after he made the last payment for the purchase of her cinder-block lodging and transferred ownership to her. There is no definite proof of this, but it is clear that her life has been transformed. She finds work in the offices of the Grand Bleu vacation village, and is soon seen around the island with a new boyfriend: a muscular Tsimihety man who works for a French yacht-charter company. Suddenly prosperous, she adopts a lofty new hairdo with extensions that gives her a Sophia Loren air. She abandons her friendships with the Red House staff, and even acquires a maid of her own to chivvy mercilessly, her niece, a placid twelve-year-old from backcountry Sandrakota.
Pianon, who has never given in to the tropical melancholy that leads white men to marinate themselves in rum, now finds himself unable to eat or sleep. Still in his unflattering tracksuits, he makes his rounds, walking with a slight limp that makes him look much older. In the Saint Grimaud market crowds, he stops and stares each time he sees a girl with a high forehead. At such times, his angular face looks as if it had turned to stone. He loses all interest in his monograph on the Sakalava.
Everyone thought Floristella would collapse from another heart attack after the fight, but he seems undamaged. He has stopped harassing Noelline, but it is rumored that he has offered fifty thousand ariary to some local toughs for an attack on Pianon. He hires two pretty replacement secretaries, slender young Comorean women with neatly braided hair. He can be seen sitting between them on his seaside porch, perusing the usual documents with a bored distracted air. In the evening, after he has sent the girls away, he sits on under the yellow light, monumental, oblivious to mosquitoes, slowly eating his way through a heap of spaghetti, his cigarette burning beside him.
At the same time, at the Red House, Pianon is seated at one end of the long table, picking at a monastic meal of cooked vegetables. Both men go to bed early.
At sunset on the Epiphany, the day before the Sennas leave again for Milan, Shay walks over to say goodbye to Floristella. He is still nursing his superb anger, sitting obdurate on his porch, immovable as a dolmen. On the horizon, a low red sun glares from under a dark cloud bank rippled like the hem of a skirt. The waves are crashing as high tide approaches, and village women, returning from work at the hotels, pass swiftly like barefoot phantoms.
Floristella—his fat cheeks a sickly maroon in the fierce lateral glow—says to Shay what he has said before: that he is not jealous or vindictive, that it is a matter of principle, a question of right and wrong. “What is written is written,” he pronounces in a sepulchral tone, as Shay looks at him with compassion. “And those who steal from others will pay.”
Shay embraces him, then walks back up the garden path to the Red House, breathing in the scent of jasmine and ylang-ylang. Approaching the lamplit veranda, she catches sight of Pianon sitting primly upright on a rattan chair, exactly where the notorious scuffle took place. He is discussing with Senna and Madame Rose the cost of installing a château d’eau to replace the up-country stream that supplies the beach houses with water. Pianon’s eyes are sunken, and he is, if possible, even thinner these days, like a dry stalk that the next malarial tremor will break. Yet he holds himself with dignity. To Shay, there is something impressive about the way he refuses to speak of his woe, just as there is a certain mad grandeur to Floristella’s noisy perorations. In some odd manner, the two men seem closer as antagonists than they were as friends. Near the end of their lives, this melodrama has bestowed on them a kind of strength, a purpose, as if they were a pair of pillars battered by time, holding up the night sky.
Then Shay considers Noelline. At this hour, the resourceful young woman is probably at home in the cinder-block house she now owns, its shutters barred against insects, thieves, blowing refuse. Perhaps she and her mother are squatting around a dish of rice with their novice maid. Or maybe she is fucking her new man, or hemming one of her Chinese dresses, or getting her scalp greased as she absorbs visions from another world on her satellite television. Or perhaps she is studying accounting or reading Pascal. Whatever she is doing, she is swiftly losing the bloom of youth that has been her main currency, growing thick-waisted and iron of countenance, as happens too early to even the prettiest island girls.
You have to respect her, Shay thinks. She’s gone far with the hand she was dealt.
But what has it meant? Was it just the usual game, with real estate and costly hair extensions as the prize, or were there subtler satisfactions? Did Noelline find glory in being, for a short while, the talk of Naratrany, the damsel hotly contested by two doleful knights?
Not much more than a year later, life—or its loyal servant, death—puts a definitive end to the triangle. And which of the rivals triumphs? According to the chattering classes of Naratrany island, it all depends on one’s point of view.
In the rainy season, Floristella, who has been having dizzy spells, is carried off to Sicily once again. There, an examination reveals that, in addition to the diabetes and the failing heart, a tumor has infiltrated a lung and spawned offspring around the huge, overtaxed body, even crowding one side of Floristella’s stubborn, fantastical brain. His family does not tell him that he will never return to Madagascar, and so he settles into a sunny, crumbling wing of his palace in Trapani to begin what he thinks of as a convalescence but which is really a short season of dying.
At the same time, political troubles begin in the capital of Madagascar, as supporters of a popular young usurper battle the President’s followers in the highland streets, torching stores and government buildings, causing unrest even on the far island of Naratrany. And the tourists take off like a flock of startled gulls.
What do politics have to do with the two old men? Well, the hotel where Noelline works closes down—and she, prudent woman that she is, renews her love affair with Pianon.
Dressed in a modest blue lamba, she arranges a chance encounter with the Italian on a village road, near the market stall of the artist Pinceau Magique. It’s almost pitiful how simple it is to get him back. Soon she is once more riding beside Pianon in Senna’s Toyota pickup, performing wifely actions like buying Sunday mille-feuilles at the Pâtisserie Trois Étoiles.
And, when the cool weather arrives in May, Pianon surprises everyone by moving out of the Red House and going off to live openly with Noelline. Not in her cinder-block house, where she leaves her mother, but in a new construction in a mixed settlement of Chinese, middle-class Malagasy, Indians, and French, on a hillside above the Muslim cemetery.
The new house is small, but with stucco walls and European proportions. They install the young maid, Pianon’s books, a generator, and a double bed from the Chinese merchant on the airport road. They also play host to Noelline’s father and an array of half brothers and uncles who suddenly materialize from the Grande Terre and spend their days squatting on the veranda, chewing khat with a businesslike air.
Noelline is judged a successful adventuress, but Pianon is thought a double fool for having taken her back. He’s gained weight and looks idiotic with happiness. Still working at the Red House, he has, in addition, taken on a number of new projects, funded by foreign developers who are leveraging the political chaos and buying up land for a song. Pianon has always enjoyed a spotless professional reputation, but now rumors begin to circulate that he is forging documents and bribing village headmen for terrain they have no right to sell. He is seen in the decrepit offices of the Sucrerie, signing papers alongside a ruthless Mauritian developer whose nickname is the Crocodile.
Back in Milan, Senna scratches his head and curses over shortfalls in the Red House accounting. Still, Pianon looks unworried; he is always at work, Noelline at his side. Then, one hot morning in January, as he stands by a window in his house that looks down the sun-scorched hill to the incorruptible blue of Finoana Bay, he turns to say something to Noelline, who is sitting at the computer.
The men on the veranda and the little maid in the side yard hear Pianon give a loud cry. It is followed by a crash and a crescendo of shrieks from Noelline. When they rush in and turn over his lanky body, he is already dead from a stroke.
Noelline, to her credit, seems genuinely grief-stricken, and has two zebus killed for the ceremony. And, to the islanders’ credit, dozens come for the feasting and mourning, even those, like the village headmen and the Crocodile, who had lately led Pianon astray. Because of the political situation, most Europeans are absent from Naratrany.
The Sennas have to use their connections to the Italian consul to cut through the tangle of red tape and get what remains of Pianon shipped back to his family tomb, in the hills above Verona. Intermittently iced, his body has lain for six days in the Saint Grimaud morgue, a cement storeroom behind the police station, and is, as the consulate delicately puts it, in a deteriorated condition.
It turns out that Pianon’s new house, along with the cinder-block residence and some prime road-front land, now belongs in some mysterious but indisputable way to Noelline. She receives an instant boost in status when it becomes clear that she is a woman of means, the owner of two houses, and she quickly distances herself from the dishonor that turns out to be Pianon’s other legacy. Just before his death, it appears, the Commissaire had drawn up a warrant for his arrest on charges of forgery and the illegal sale of government terrain. Had he remained alive, Pianon would have been locked up to eat boiled manioc in the grim colonial stockade that is the Naratrany prison. But all has ended as he, possibly, would have wished it.
“Così è la vita” is Floristella’s only observation when he hears of Pianon’s death and disgrace. The words are tossed off with indifference, with a regal movement of his big swollen hand as he lies amid threadbare pillows on a huge-wheeled wicker chaise longue on a terrace of the ramshackle palace, looking out toward distant Tunisia. But, for a minute, before he falls back into the morphine haze, his black eyes hold a gleam of savage glee.
The rest of his life is brief. In the afternoons, lizards run up and down the crumbling plaster behind his head, and, when awake, he stares off across a cracked balustrade toward the container ships, the hangars, the teeming chaos of the port and the open Mediterranean, almost as pure a blue as the Mozambique Channel.Night and day, they tell him lies—his daughters and sons, his grandchildren, his straight-backed wife with her rough, aristocratic voice—they all say, over and over, that Floristella will go back to Madagascar. To sit enthroned as usual on the porch of his Naratrany bungalow, gazing out over the strait at the bellying sails of the fishing pirogues and the boutres hauling timber from the Grande Terre.
Through the drugs he listens, and envisions a scene on Finoana Beach, years ago, when he dragged ashore a pair of hammerhead sharks: he, Floristella, young, bearded, and muscular; his children, blond and small, shrieking with glee as his knife bites through the tough sharkskin and the cold dark blood soaks into the sand. Behind him hovers the face of a girl, a young Sakalava woman with a high forehead, who stares at him with a sly edge of affection in her shallow-set eyes. Then a blink of brown and blue, a sound of wailing that might come from his family or from some cyclonic turn of the weather over the Indian Ocean. Then nothing.
Just four months after Pianon is placed in the tomb in the hills above Verona, the body of Floristella lies in an extra-large open casket in the old deconsecrated chapel of his palace, redone in the seventies with ugly murals of fishing apostles, as a crowd of family and friends—aristocrats mingling with sailors, mechanics, market venders, and the odd mafioso—spill out the doorway onto the seawall. He has been dressed in one of the open-necked shirts he always wore on Naratrany, with his big black-nailed feet bare as they almost always were in life.
Present are Senna, choking with sobs, and Shay, who stands thinking about how much she will miss Floristella, how long it will take for his giant presence to dissipate into memory, and thinking also of his less grand qualities: how he’d kill palm rats with a slingshot and treat her children’s coral scratches with rum.
After the cremation, his wife and children scatter his ashes in the sea. Floristella at the very end insisted on this, declaring that with the currents he would find his own way back to Madagascar.
So who is the winner? the idlers at the Fleur des Îles café ask. Is it Pianon, who got the girl but died of it, and was sent home putrescent with a stench of crime? Or is it Floristella, cuckolded and robbed of his revenge, but who outlived his enemy and passed away in peace, in a garland of family and friends?
No one consults the person who many think is the real winner. Noelline is an island personage these days, and after her months of mourning—her mother and uncles carefully guarding her two houses—she allows herself to grow distinctly stout, adopts a pair of nephews, and blossoms into a commanding, wealthy Malagasy matriarch.
After a few years, she opens a big dry-goods store in Renirano village, in partnership with a recent arrival on the island, a sheep-faced young man from Bologna, who may or may not be her lover. (Her other lovers are said to include a powerful senator and the king of the Sakalava.) There Noelline sits, magisterial behind the register in the prosperous gloom, with the hubbub and squalor of the Renirano market right outside her door, totting up shopping lists for Australian yachtsmen or rich Europeans and Indians, barking out orders to her nephews, who haul cases of imported gin, soft drinks, frozen chickens, and cartons of laundry soap. Her thick gold chains are laid out for all to see on her handsome jutting bosom, her eyebrows are pencilled in superb arches, and her ever-changing hair extensions are the best that money can buy.
Pianon’s beloved library remains at the Red House until Shay decides to donate it to the scholarly priest Père Jobeny; she and Bertine la Grande spend a melancholy hour cleaning rot and insects out of the yellowing old volumes. At one point, flipping through Pianon’s copy of “Transes, Rites et Talismans dans le Sud-Est Malgache,” she thinks of Noelline and observes to Bertine that the woman has at least shown character in making a success out of an unpromising fate.
But Bertine’s response is predictable: a single terse shake of her head, which is crowned with impeccably twisted knots. “Pas bien!” she says in a dismissive tone, before picking up another book. ♦
Published in the print edition of the January 4 & 11, 2021, issue, with the headline “The Rivals.
Andrea Lee, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, is the author of several books, including the novel “Red Island House,” which will be published in March, 2021.
THE NEW YORKER
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