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

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 the impeccable poise of people who live where their ancestors did, who have never been stolen or scattered.

“Ah, voici l’équipe! Bonjour, bonjour!” calls out Senna in a loud, joking tone, which is evidently the established way he relates to them. On her first trips abroad with Senna, Shay was at first mortified by the clowning persona he often adopted but has found to her surprise that his buffoonery works surprisingly well in countries where, in any case, Europeans are considered barbarians. The typical reaction is that Senna is at first tolerated with the indulgence reserved for children or lunatics, and then, slowly, an unexpected intimacy is born. Shay sees immediately from the expressions of the Red House staff that her husband is well liked, if not quite respected.

When, with the air of a ringmaster announcing a trapeze artist, he introduces her—“Et finalement—la plus belle fleur de l’Amérique: ma femme, Madame Shay!”—they address her in a sonorous chorus that sounds rehearsed: “Bonjour, Madame!”

But when she in turn greets them in painstakingly rehearsed Malagasy—“Mula tsara!”—they all burst out laughing.

It’s a pure expression of appreciation, and she and Senna find themselves giggling too. To Shay this spontaneous peal of laughter is an unlooked-for gift that offers a shining glimpse of connection, of possibility. Perhaps indeed things will work out here.

But just then the dark faces close up like shutters, as a fat white man with a walking stick stumps onto the veranda. A loud European voice barks: “Qu’est-ce que vous en faites là, à rire comme des couillons? What are you all doing standing there laughing like fools? Where are the drinks for Madame and Monsieur?”

This is how Kristos, Senna’s right-hand man in Madagascar, first appears before Shay, at the entrance to the house that will become their secret battlefield. Kristos the Greek, the house manager. Majordomo. Governante. From the start, her enemy.

He is Shay’s first live example of the kind of pan-European rogue who turns up in African backwaters and in every derelict former outpost of empire. Claims to be a Greek from Thessaloniki, speaks Italian with a Pugliese accent,