Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

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 mena—the Red House. La Maison Rouge. In any language, the appellation is such a natural fit that nobody, not even Senna, ever uses anything else, or after a short while even recalls that there was an earlier name.

Of course Senna’s acts of architectural hubris are minuscule in comparison to those of pharaohs, sultans, and Aztec kings. He brings his vision to life with the glee of an eighteenth-century English lord adding follies to his ancestral acres, or an American robber baron transplanting parts of dismembered chateaux to Newport. And in the end, mysteriously, it all works.

Though it could have looked cartoonish, the big roof rises with undeniable majesty above the feathery line of palms between the cane fields and the beach. Unlike anything built by the Sakalava, the Indian merchants, or the colonial French, it nevertheless appears plausible in that landscape, and Senna is delighted to see his creation up there against the sky. He isn’t a bad man; but after long years spent peddling irrigation valves, his soul is thrown off-balance by the possibilities of a country where he is not just a successful businessman, but a nabob.

So in a fit of arrogance he declares that he, Senna, won’t be guided by the broad hints of Colonel Andrianasolo and the local village headmen; will not inaugurate the new house with the customary feast for the construction workers, neighbors, and friends. Not until such time as he feels like it. Maybe never. And he will certainly never go to the trouble and expense of butchering a pair of black and white zebu bulls just to honor a lot of superstitious claptrap.

And so the islanders—the fishermen, charcoal burners, cane workers, hotel maids, gardeners, mechanics, market vendors, prostitutes, woodcarvers, middle-class shopkeepers, and professionals—observe this neglect of the proprieties without rancor, but with a sense of inevitable consequences. Particularly the Sakalava feel this way. They are the abiding ones, the teratany, residents essential to the place as volcanic bedrock, for generations washed over by the caprice and varied abuses of the vazaha, as they call the foreigners who come and go on the land. These locals know all about the disrespected dead, and they watch, unsurprised, as the Red House begins, even before it is furnished, to accumulate an evil atmosphere. It happens bit by bit, just as dust and litter build up in the corners of an unswept room.

And finally, as is so often the case, it becomes a woman’s job to clean things up.

3.

Shay Gilliam, Senna’s second wife, doesn’t imagine when she first sees the Red House that because of it she’ll soon be engaged in a life-and-death struggle, swept up in an occult battle that devolves on mastery, on many kinds of possession.

What are mastery and possession after all, but advanced forms of desire? And Shay, a university instructor raised with staunch East Bay political correctness amid the progressive Black middle class of Oakland, California, has, emphatically, never desired a tropical manse like a jumped-up plantation fantasy. Throughout a bookish childhood and beyond, Shay, always known as the flighty one in her family, has cherished many peculiar wishes (an ability to walk through walls is just one), but not once has she pictured herself as the chatelaine of a neocolonial pleasure palace, conjured up on African soil.

But the Red House has been in her husband’s life longer than she has. During their first meeting, at a wedding in Como, Senna boasts of his Madagascar project to Shay, as she flirts with him from under the brim of an extravagant couture straw hat, and their unlikely romance begins. Unlikely because the tall, mischievously smiling Fulbright scholar with her Ivy League degrees seems to have nothing in common with the short, pushy Lombard businessman whose sole diploma is a high school ragioneria certificate. Yet this odd couple surprise themselves, and those who know them, by promptly falling in love, with an intensity