I want to be original in this book I’m writing. Even though I’ve tried to shed my white skin, I’m a European.”
On his second full day in Antananarivo, the capital, a Sunday, he had been invited to an afternoon gathering at the headmaster’s house, on a bluff overlooking the city. He had scarcely been outside his lodgings, having spent the previous day unpacking, drinking purified water that nonetheless tasted of limestone, writing letters home to Sala, his parents, friends, letting them know he had made the journey from the port to the capital safely; and sleeping, his body acclimatizing itself to the heat, the attenuated mountain air. He had written to Sala: “We sailed from Zanzibar. A monkey raced, screeching, around the upper deck…The journey from the port to the capital took nine days. We were carried on palanquins by native bearers. I detest this system of exploitation, and yet find myself with no alternative but to take part in it. We passed the Dutchmen’s Graveyard. So many Dutch colonists were killed by native fevers that the Netherlands gave up their attempt to take this island. King Radàma said his two most powerful generals were Hàzo and Tàzo, Forest and Fever, and any army overcoming the one would be slain by the other.”
As he left his hostel, a man pulling a pousse pousse ran alongside of him, imploring his business, a man so thin his legs seemed those of a child’s stick figure. Jacques’ initial explanation and polite refusals grew less and less courteous in the face of the rickshaw puller’s insistence, but Jacques could not bear to be a fat European lugged about by an undernourished native. He had never before thought of himself as stout, but compared to these locals he was.
“Sir, sir, very cheap, sir, very cheap.”
Surely, though, the man needed his business. To refuse it might be to condemn him to a night of hunger. Perhaps he should just give the rickshaw-man the coins he would have charged—but no, it would do no good to make him an object of charity. The rickshaw puller seemed to assume that Jacques’ insistence on walking was a bargaining tactic, that if he lowered his price enough, Jacques would climb in.
Of course, Jacques had known he was white, but his whiteness had seemed to be a thing which existed on the surface. As he labored up the hill—despite his muscled calves, he had a much more difficult time of it than the scrawny natives around him—he saw that his whiteness was in his sinews, in the way he had of holding his belly, in the way he, a wearer of shoes, walked. The taste of his tongue in his mouth was the taste of a European tongue. Every glass of wine he had drunk, every meal he had eaten, all the books he had read, the physical training he had undergone in boot camp: all of these had left traces in him. He could live like a native for another two decades and still not purge his past.
He recognized—he was becoming quite winded by the climb—that his mental processes were becoming less and less acute, as they did before he drifted off to sleep. Still sober enough to realize he was growing light-headed, he looked around for the rickshaw puller. Yes, he saw now that it would make sense to avail himself of the man’s services. But the man had given up.
He arrived at the headmaster’s house, pale and shaky.
“You couldn’t find a pousse pousse?” his hostess cried.
Jacques was aware not just of the sheen of perspiration covering his face, but also that sweat was darkening the underarms of his jacket. “The idea of it, it doesn’t sit well with me.”
The headmaster’s wife laid a quasi-maternal hand on his shoulder. “You’ll have to shed some of the rather naive beliefs you’ve brought with you from home…This heat, the thin air, our European constitutions simply aren’t adapted to them…Oh, if we had known, we would have sent our driver.”
Feeling like a bit of an invalid (yes, it was true, he had a tinge of heat stroke), he allowed himself to be led to an ornate wicker armchair on the verandah, to have a cold drink, a mix of citron liqueur and seltzer water and chipped ice—how on earth did they manage to get ice here?—pressed into his hand. A servant was called to fan him; Jacques protested, “Really, I’ll be fine, I just needed to sit down—”
“No, no, I won’t hear of it. Our generator is on the blink, so we haven’t electricity, otherwise the ceiling fans would be…it’s the least we can do. If you refuse, you’ll make me feel a poor hostess indeed.”
Slightly ridiculous, all of this—the pasha on his throne, the palm frond fan wafting through the air above him, the women flocking around him, a harem of off-white butterflies, the afternoon heat making the perfumes and dusting powders they wore more intense—a cloying mix of the scents of so many different women, attar of roses and apple blossom, sandalwood—recalling, in a minor key, the clashing smells of rotting flesh, antiseptics, phenol and camphor in the military hospital, as their pale linens called to mind the white-garbed nurses.
“He needs a lighter suit.”
“My husband has a wonderful tailor in Paris,” a woman who had perched herself on the arm of his chair murmured. “His man here can take your measurements.” Was Jacques imagining a hint of lasciviousness in the way she said, take your measurements? Surely she wouldn’t be so forward, he must be still a touch addled from the heat. Wouldn’t it be more practical to have the tailoring done by a local? He was certain that if he were to say that, he would be met by a chorus of fond derision, humored out of this delusion the way an inebriate is simultaneously coddled and bullied.
The woman who had seated herself on the arm of his chair fished an ice cube from her glass, ran it across her forehead, and then, tilting her head back, over her neck and collarbone.
“Margot!” another woman reprimanded, indicating with a jerk of her chin Margot’s bodice, in danger of growing translucent from the melting ice. “Don’t you know—my husband can explain it to you quite scientifically—homeostasis and all of that—rubbing yourself down with ice only makes you hotter in the long run.”
“Oh, I don’t care about the long run! I’m unbearably hot right now.”
Again, he wondered if he were imagining double meanings.
Margot asked: “And what is it that’s brought you to us, all the way from Paris?”
He was surprised that she knew he had come from Paris. Before the afternoon was over, he would understand how bored these members of the European community were, the thrill that had coursed through the outpost upon news of his arrival. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they had gathered not just the simple facts of his name, place of origin, date of birth, educational background—but that they’d even managed to get wind of the report of the medical examiner who had certified his fitness for this posting: a 24-year-old male of medium height (1 meter 78) and build (72 kgs) with no apparent deformities or anomalies. Good family history, one tubercular uncle on the mother’s side. His arrival had galvanized these women, kindling hope in them. (A foolish hope, for they’d had these fantasies many times before, and just as often been disappointed.) He had let them down already by the mere fact of him. But rather than admit to their despair, they were attempting to drive it away with drinks and flirtation and banter.
Jacques answered her question forthrightly: “A desire for—adventure, I suppose.”
“Oh, surely there’s more to it than that?” Her eye fixed on him, determined to unearth a secret. “An unhappy love affair? A scandal?”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Jacques said, although that wasn’t true: in fact, he was conceiving such an animosity towards these exiles,
