I was sitting drinking a morning coffee in one of my favourite cafés, in one of my favourite Malagasy towns: Diego Suarez on the northern tip of this huge island.
Jacques was French, in his late sixties or early seventies. He was wispy and looks physically frail. He had difficulty mounting the few steps to the café terrace. He wore spectacles and his uncut, feathery hair straggled to his shoulders. His cheeks were gaunt but his eyes were bright and alert.
There were no vacant places on the terrace so he sat at my table. Like many people living alone and out of their context he was anxious to talk – especially to someone who hadn’t heard his story many times before.
He had lived contentedly for five years in Madagascar but was now feeling betrayed. He had shared five years of happiness with an educated, intelligent Malagasy girl who “spoke French so well she could have been French herself”. He had loved her and looked after her. He explained animatedly how she had betrayed him. “
She went away with a white man who was not much younger than me”. He repeated this point about the age, “But, he had more money to spend on her than I did, that was the only difference.” She had dropped him without warning, just like that and gone off. He had come home one evening and she was no longer there.
I sympathised but, Maybe not much younger but surely better looking, I was thinking. “So you’re alone now?” I asked. His eyes, darting around the terrace, lit up. “Only until the day after tomorrow”, he grinned.
He had organised a twenty-year old to come and live with him. She was coming from the ‘brousse’, the deep countryside. She was taking a small plane, for the first time in her life, to a regional town that day and then taking a minibus on a long tortuous 12h ride to where he lived. He had never spoken to her, she didn’t speak much French. She was the niece of a Malagasy lady who lived near him and it was she who had suggested and organised the arrangement.
He was going to send her to school to finish her secondary education and learn some French so they could speak to each other. He was minimising the risk of flight this time around. Language-wise, she wouldn’t be ready to have a relationship with another foreigner for a long time even if she wanted to; she had too much to learn. He left me; he was going to do some shopping. He wanted the kitchen ready so she would be able to do some cooking as soon as she arrived. His thoughts were already elsewhere — imagining her arrival, the kitchen stocked, the future rehearsed.
I wished him good luck; he seemed pleased with himself and looking forward to the next stage of his life. He hoped everything would go all right. Just bringing her from where she lived was costing him a lot of money, he said.
I try not to be judgemental in these situations but I was thinking as he walked away: poor girl. The kitchen seemed like a prison; hopefully – though she might not be sophisticated she might, indeed, be streetwise and, of course, she had what seemed a fairly shrewd aunt behind her to help balance things out!
There are many Jacques in Madagascar, of course not of them in relationships as one-sided as Jacques seemed to be preparing. Indeed when he became dependent on her it might not be so one-sided after all
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