Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

Shay stumbles along in her wake, hampered by the long skirt she was told to wear, and hobbled as well by her American common sense, which is struggling with the awareness that she has crossed a threshold into the deep unknown. Her woven shoulder bag, concealing a wad of ariary bills and the small gift Bertine suggested, bangs against her side, as she tries not to think of the fact that she is seeking out the Neighbor, a notorious conjurer, in hopes that he can lift the spell on her house.

2.

How has this peculiar quest come about? You could say it is because of something else that hasn’t come about: the housewarming ceremony that Shay’s husband, Senna, a rich but stingy Italian businessman, neglects to hold when he finishes building his fantasy vacation residence on Naratrany. So tightfisted is Senna that not even one zebu bull is slaughtered for the local villagers, not one festive step danced, not one glass of rum poured on the ground for thirsty ancestors, when the last thatch has been laid on the big villa he constructed on what was formerly Colonel Andrianasolo’s lot on Finoana Beach.

Naratrany, a very minor part of Madagascar, is a small lush island with a central crater that gives it from afar the look of a squashed green fedora. Framed by coral reefs, it is one of a chain of ancient fumaroles that in the Tertiary period arose to become satellites to the huge main island. Though defined by cartographers as part of Africa, Madagascar really belongs only to itself, having developed its independent character over the millions of years since the primeval continent of Gondwana broke apart and abandoned the shield-shaped landmass in the sea between Mozambique and India. The topography of the country ranges from deserts of lunar desolation to swathes of emerald rice fields; from allées of baobabs to impenetrable forested uplands; but its coastal fringe of palmy islets is perhaps loveliest of all. In a letter from the early 1900s, a French priest (and amateur poet) stationed on Naratrany describes it as “un petit morceau du paradis, tombé des cieux.” He notes as well that the name Naratrany seems to mean “broken” or “wounded,” though it is unclear whether this refers to a forgotten battle or the island’s craterous shape.

Located on an ancient Indian Ocean trade route, the tiny dot of land has for centuries been a magnet for explorers, missionaries, pirates, and plunderers of all descriptions. It is the territory of the Sakalava, one of Madagascar’s nineteen peoples, a linchpin in that martial tribe’s vast kingdom, which once covered all western Madagascar. Sakalava lived on Naratrany before the earliest Indian merchants arrived; were present with their zebu cattle when the pirates Tew and Avery sailed through; were there when their powerful rivals the Merina, aided by British guns, swept down from the highlands to conquer the coast; were in residence when France annexed all Madagascar as a colony, and still there in 1960 when the colony won independence.

This history connects to the story of the Red House, since the swathe of beachfront that Colonel Andrianasolo sells to Senna belonged, a century earlier, to a Malagasy nobleman, a cousin of the Sakalava queen. A now-forgotten quarrel cut short the life of this gentleman and one of his retainers, and their remains still rest discreetly in a far corner of the property, concealed by the roots of a huge kapok tree.

Colonel Andrianasolo, a Merina whose father snapped up the property just after independence, knows all about the hidden graves when, after intense bargaining with the wily Italian, he signs the certificat d’achat. But the colonel prudently keeps silent about the unusual feature of the terrain. He only expresses a neighborly hope—Andrianasolo vacations on the next beach over, in a properly exorcized 1970s bungalow—that Senna’s future housewarming celebration will include the proper formalities, and the sacrifice of two zebus.

But, like many self-made men, Senna is willful in strange ways. Much of his youth was spent helping his family hustle their way out of postwar poverty in the malarial rice fields of Vercelli, and, now in middle age, he is contentedly ensconced as ruler of his own profitable company that brokers repair services for agricultural machines all over Europe. A wiry Lombard with a brawler’s crooked nose, he has a steel-trap mind and shrewd green eyes able to ferret out the scurviest tactics of his competitors. But unlike most Italians of his hardscrabble generation, he has an early life that includes an odd chapter: as a teenager, he spent a year in Rome in the dolce vita era, working for a cousin who was a cameraman at Cinecittà. The immersion in the magical atmosphere of golden age Italian cinema, the sight of film stars walking the earth amid the rubble of a world war and the ruins of imperial Rome, awakened a dreaming side in young Senna. But when his father suddenly died and he had to return to the rice lands, he put this part of his nature under wraps. There it remains for decades, until he has divorced his first wife, and his savings are snug in discreet refuges around the world.

Then, in his forties and free at last to indulge in midlife folly, he sets off on a six-month fishing trip around the Indian Ocean with a buddy from his military service year, a weathered sea dog of a Calabrian baron, born in Italian Somaliland. Crossing the Mozambique Channel, en route from the Comoros islands, their sloop draws up upon the eastern coast of Naratrany, and at first sight of the island, Senna is struck with a raw mixture of feelings: a roundhouse punch of mingled amazement, ambition, lust: what he imagines the early explorers felt, staring dumbfounded from their caravels.

Motionless at the rail, he gazes over Finoana Bay to a low-rising land formation that is dazzlingly, virginally green, as if it is the first time that color has been used