Red Island House

“From then on their life fell apart fast, the way white lives can in the tropics. People would find them crawling around on the floor, drunk on Dzama rum, high on whatever chemicals they’d ingested. Outlaw types camped out at their bungalow on Finoana Beach: drug dealers, burnt-out mercenaries, gunrunners working between South Africa and Eastern Eu

Anyway, I touched off his creaky laugh by quoting him one of my favorite lines from King Solomon’s Mines: ‘Two things I have learned: you can’t keep a Zulu from battle, or a sailor from falling in love.’ ” Orso looks at Shay incredulously. “I can’t believe you, of all people, read that racist stuff.” “Orso, when I was a kid I was crazy about Rider

The daughters he and his partner adopted are Eritrean, so he is touchy about anything having to do with Africa, particularly since a Fascist branch of his family made a fortune from the cotton trade in Asmara. He continues: “And a spoiled signora having a fling with the skipper is no different from a husband fucking the nanny. Just plain common. I’

A few weeks later, when she hears that Maz has died, she thinks that she chose the wrong confidant in frivolous Orso, that she made the whole account—as Orso said—into an adventure tale. But was there anything else to do? Even Maz, for whom silence was an entire language, knew that words, however imprecise, are sometimes required to honor things th

“Right away I understood that he was one of those very quiet men who, if pressed, can be very dangerous. That he was also the kind of man who picks one woman, and puts himself totally in her power.

“No, no, carissima, that was a thousand and one coffees’ worth of entertainment!” says Orso, pulling on his loden coat and preemptively brushing past Shay as he plucks a five-euro note from his wallet and, with a flourish, hands it to the unsmiling Irish cashier. “Yes, quite a yarn,” he continues, as he gallantly holds open the brass-barred front d

On the one hand the scene was hilarious: the manager bullied by his staff; the priestly Pianon helplessly aroused by the loud, ribald female crowd around him. Shay has 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

Straw-hatted, barefoot, swinging their sandals, Shay and Felice set off walking along the hems of the incoming waves, in coral sand so fine that their footsteps leave milky clouds in the warm transparent shallows. Tiny ghost crabs, almost invisible, scatter in mincing crowds as they proceed, and the sea breeze of the rising tide ruffles the sea pin

“We should report it!” exclaims Shay, knowing that what she says is absurd. The rudimentary forces of law on the island have no interest in the ravings of a crazy foreigner up on the remote north coast. Or in the fate of one maimed woman from a distant tribe. And, how much of the tale Franco recounted actually occurred? As sometimes happens on Nara