Antipode – Chapter 15

A Sea of Moral Ambiguity

Antipode was originally published in 2001, and is a true account of many of the events that I experienced while doing research in Madagascar from 1993 - 1999. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

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Back on Nosy Mangabe, we resumed our routine. The boat dropped us on the island a little after eight in the morning, but since the night had been cool and rainy, the frogs were still active. The island was relatively quiet. There was a clove boat moored just offshore, and some sailors investigated me as I sat doing focal watches. Another man, notable for his extremely bright red shorts, wandered into camp in the late afternoon. Down at the fisherman’s camp, six-foot-high cubes of cloves sat on shore—small amounts of cloves packed tight into woven nylon bags, then smacked into squareness and piled high. The massive clove cubes were guarded by two wispy men with squirrelly eyes.

We had found raw peanuts in town, and brought them back in excited anticipation of a bit of variety in our island diet. That night we had a dinner of rice, lentils, and peanuts freshly roasted over a charcoal fire. After Jessica went to bed, I wandered towards the dock, and ran into Lebon and Fortune coming out of their cabin, shirts draped over their shoulders. They had the air of men going down to the boat to get stoned, and hung back in the shadows as I approached. On the dock, I lay watching the stars for a while, then slowly, as if in a dream, got up and walked back to my tent. I intended to immerse myself further in War and Peace, and sleep a deep sleep.

My tent platform, a haven, beckoned. My field clothes, now perpetually stinking from mold and sweat, were hanging on a peg attached to the thatch of the roof, ready to greet me in the morning. But I had, as always, showered in the waterfall before dinner, and was wearing the one change of clothes that never left camp, clothes that did not smell. I took off my shoes, and climbed into my tent.

In my tent I keep very little, as early on Lebon and Fortune warned us that the fishermen might come and steal things. But upon returning from Maroantsetra this morning, I had been in a hurry to get into the forest, so instead of hiding my money in the lab, I had dropped most of my remaining cash into my tent, inside a ziploc, itself inside an opaque, green cordura bag. Other than that new addition, my tent had the usual collection of things: a chocolate stash, a pair of pants, some medicines, and the air mattress I slept on.

This night, the green cordura bag was unzipped, and the ziploc full of money gone. As always happens in situations that are too awful to comprehend in one blow, I first denied the obvious, and sat looking into space wondering what it was I’d forgotten. I flew past my actions in the last several days wondering if I could have misplaced it, and finally concluded I’d been robbed. This was the vast majority of my remaining cash, almost $700 in a combination of Malagasy francs (FMG) and dollars. I had our tickets back to Tana, and my international plane ticket home, but no other resources. Losing that money would mean real hardship for the remaining five weeks of this field season as, even though expenses are inordinately low in Madagascar, they are not zero.

What to do? Still disbelieving, I considered trying to sleep. I felt sure that any attempt to recover the money would be futile, and would alienate innocent people in the process. Finally, though, I decided that this was foolishness, that I would not be able to hold my head high and admit to having been robbed if I did not pursue the issue. There was only one boat near the island; the culprits must be on it. So I went to Jessica’s tent, pausing outside, not knowing if she was asleep.

“Jessica?” I asked, tentative.

“Yes?” came the prompt reply.

“Uh, Jessica, I’ve been robbed.” My voice cracked.

“Oh shit,” her disembodied voice said, “I’ll be right out.”

Tent platform, tarped against the sideways rain

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We decided that since Lebon and Fortune were already down at the boat, we would go down there and demand restitution, hopefully with their help. We considered several plans, including the one we preferred most: talking to the captain, allowing him to somehow receive the money anonymously, then having him give it back to us, so that nobody need pay for their thievery if they gave it back now. As we were wandering around camp, somewhat dazed, trying to get our wits together, Lebon and Fortune came back. We explained the situation to them, and they stared at us, silently, in the dark. They were probably freshly stoned from their expedition down to the boat, but rose to the occasion admirably. Jessica asked Lebon what he thought we should do.

“Well,” he puffed himself up, happy to have his opinion asked, “we must go down there.” So we did. The four of us walked, single file and silent, down the dark path. When we were almost within earshot of the remote camp, Lebon told us that there was a problem.

“The boat is docked out in the bay, and there are no pirogues here to take us to it,” he noted. At the remote camp, the high piles of cloves were silhouetted against the moonlight that glinted on the sea, and sweetened the air. The two guardians sat against them, smoking. Lebon and Fortune talked to the guardians for a while, then one of them whistled for a subsidiary boat to come, which would take us to the larger, clove-transporting boat.

“We will go out there and accuse everyone who seems suspicious,” Lebon told us, then added conspiratorially, “and we think we have an idea about who it might be. There are a guy and a girl, whom nobody likes. They seem like the types to steal money.” We soon realized that this couple was very young, very middle class, and out on their first trip together, having paid the captain of the clove boat to take them south to Tamatave. She was the only woman on the entire boat, and they both came from a higher class than the crew. Plenty to make sailors jealous—the perfect scapegoats.

Meanwhile, other pieces of news had floated our way. The clove boat was leaving for Tamatave that night, so we needed to go out now and deal with this. The man in red shorts I’d seen entering camp became another prime suspect, though I only mentioned him as a possibility. Lebon asked me repeatedly if I could identify red-shorts man, and I said, no, absolutely not, for I couldn’t accuse someone simply because he had made the mistake of walking through my field of vision. As we were standing around at the edge of the forest, waiting for the boat to come get us, Jessica and I began telling stories to fill the time.

“You should be quiet,” Lebon advised us, “and get low, as the thief, hearing vazaha voices on shore, might panic. Then he will throw the money overboard.” Getting low seemed gratuitous, but we did stop talking. “The other thing,” Lebon continued, “is that a woman visited from Maroantsetra today, in a pirogue, to visit someone on the boat, and she has already gone home. Maybe she took the money with her then.” I despaired of ever seeing my money again.

Finally, the smaller boat arrived, and we waded out to it and clambered aboard, getting thoroughly drenched in the process. It took us to the clove boat which, still having a full load of cloves aboard, smelled wonderful. It was 25 feet long, with a vague likeness to a Chinese junk—the hull was made of wooden planks, and a small wood shack sat perched at the stern. On the top, where we stood, most of the rest of the surface was covered in huge flat bags of cloves. The boat was taking those cloves to Tamatave, then returning for the load on shore.

Lebon indicated that Jessica and I should stay out of the fray, so we sat ourselves down on a clove-filled mattress and watched the goings-on. Lebon, apparently quite a diplomat, stood on the center of the flat-topped boat, where all the crew had assembled, and explained the situation in Malagasy. A single flashlight illuminated him and the assembly; Jessica and I were outside of its sphere. His address went on for five, then ten minutes, and I found myself lying back on the bed of cloves, listening to the waves against the wooden hull and Lebon’s melodic but indecipherable voice, gazing up at the indigo sky, pierced with stars. Sailors furtively stole glances at Jessica and me, more often with wonder than with animosity. I was growing concerned that this would turn ugly, but we never felt in any danger for ourselves, only for other people and their reputations.

Lebon finished his speech, and the captain stood up, holding the flashlight. He shone it into everyone’s face in succession, demanding of them what they knew. Everyone who was known to have gone on shore was hauled out, and all whom Lebon and Fortune had seen in camp were given special scrutiny.

The formalities disintegrated for a few moments, as if by fiat, and the captain approached Jessica and me. Speaking in a low French that the sailors most likely did not understand, he gave us his opinion of the situation.

“The cook is your man,” he confided in us, pointing at a little man with skin darker than the rest. “He is new to my boat, and I don’t trust him.” We didn’t respond to this newest accusation, and the captain sidled off.

“In Tana,” Jessica told me, after the captain left, “a woman had her purse stolen, and the thief was brought down by so many angry men that he was hospitalized for his wounds.” She paused, and looked at the cook, sitting alone in a dark corner of the boat. “Everyone’s enemies are being named in this witch hunt.” She looked gloomy.

As people began to settle down again, it seemed that a plan had been arrived at without consultation of the two vazaha. We were to take the four most suspicious people to shore, with their bags, and search them thoroughly. If we found nothing, we would take them to the police the next morning (for which privilege I would have to pay, with money I no longer had). Meanwhile, the boat would go to Tamatave as scheduled that night.

“But we just want to get the money back,” Jessica argued to the group, though most spoke no French. “Please, if the money is returned anonymously, there will be no retribution.” Nobody but us were pleased with the option she proposed. We had no choice but to go along with the group plan, and so reboarded the smaller boat and, with several innocent people, and at most one guilty party, went back to shore. We steeled ourselves for an ugly scene.

In the fisherman’s camp the guy and his girl, the cook, and one other sailor emptied out all their worldly belongings for us to stare at. I wanted nothing to do with it. If any of them had stolen the money, it surely wouldn’t be in their things now anyway. What were we proving by humiliating them in this way? The girl scowled as she sorted through her underwear for all the men to see, and her boyfriend made a show of demonstrating that he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to hide. As expected, no ziploc holding two million Malagasy francs was revealed.

“If the money is returned,” repeated Jessica at my urging, “everything will be fine. We don’t need to know who took it, or why. We will be satisfied.” Otherwise, we would, somehow, involve the police the next day. Thinly veiled threats were made by Lebon. We left the four scapegoats and one remaining clove guardian, as the other was leaving with the boat, and walked back to camp.

The walk back was surreal unto itself as, being a moonlit night, we decided to walk down the beach rather than through the forest. The tide was high, and the moon lit the bay. Jessica and I walked in front of the two conservation agents, relieved to be free from the process for the moment, as if the whole incident had been but a dream from which we were now in the process of waking. From behind us, Lebon called our names. We looked back to find him holding a large nasty looking fish, long and thin and blue with many tiny razor sharp teeth. We boggled at him, and asked him the first question that came to mind, though it was also the stupidest.

“Where did you get that?”

“I caught it,” he said proudly, and again had the opportunity to puff himself up. Fortune smiled shyly behind him. He was always the wifely one, supporting Lebon in all his endeavors, never demanding any attention for himself, indeed, shrugging off questions addressed directly to him as if they would cause people to think too much of him and too little of Lebon.

“You caught that?” Though I didn’t like to encourage Lebon in his manly pride, this was impressive. The fish, still struggling, looked downright dangerous. Knowing very little about fish, but knowing there were barracuda in the waters here, I thought it might be one.

“Is it a barracuda?” I asked.

“No,” Lebon stated, as if he knew what he was talking about, “but perhaps in the same family.” I just stared at him. To our sounds of encouragement, Lebon strode into camp carrying his prize, which he had somehow managed to catch with his bare hands in a pounding surf.

Before going to bed, Lebon told me to check my tent thoroughly for the money. I did, and also rechecked every inch of the lab.  Finally, near midnight, I fell into a fitful sleep. It was starting to rain.

ö

In the morning it was still raining and, having a day of misery with the police ahead of me, I slept in. At 7:30 I trudged to the lab, found the door closed, which meant that Jessica was still sleeping, and pushed it open. There, on the table, was the ziploc full of money, intact. I was stunned. Looking around as if expecting to see gnomes, I picked it up and felt it, to make sure it was real. In a daze, I walked over to the cabin where Lebon and Fortune were just having breakfast, the first of their three daily rice meals. They too had slept in after the late night on the clove boat. I showed the money to them, not knowing what to say, and they, too, were flabbergasted. They asked me where I had found it. No, I replied, I did not find it, it was returned, it was on the table in the lab this morning.

They looked at me, unsure, and seemed not quite to believe me. Having intended to tip each of them with a 25,000 FMG note, I peeled off the bills in front of them. Lebon murmured “no, no” to my effusive thanks, but I said “yes, yes,” and wandered back to the lab. Briefly, I thought the whole debacle might be over.

But what of the five hapless folk down at the remote camp, four of whom were innocent, and had been delayed by one thief? I thought it necessary to give them cadeaux as well, but decided to wait until Jessica got up to broach this subject with the conservation agents.

Sitting in the lab, having put on my field clothes just as it started to rain again, Lebon and Fortune came to me. They seemed to have something on their minds, but were not eager to say it. I tried to encourage them, but they stammered and mumbled and I couldn’t make any sense of it, except that they wanted to know what to do about the five people down at the remote camp.

“Normally,” Lebon began, as per usual, turning utterly unique situations into everyday ones, “we would radio for the police this morning and let them take care of the problem. But the money has been found. So, shall we radio the police?”

“No, no,” I hastily tried to correct them, “the money has been returned, so I am happy, content. I do not want to involve the police.” They looked at me, silently. “Is there something else you want to say to me?” I asked, truly curious what it was that was so difficult for them to address. After a few more minutes of stop-and-go conversation, we decided that, before I went down my stand, which is near the remote camp, Lebon and Fortune would go and tell them that the money was returned, and that the police would not be called, and all was well. As they left, Jessica emerged from her tent, and I called her over for help with communication.

The stickiest part of the conversation was when I introduced deception into the mix. I suggested that, if it was better for these five detainees, they could tell the captain of the boat they’d been on that the vazaha had found her money, and that none of them were implicated. This didn’t translate well at all, and Lebon seemed intent on pursuing a witch hunt. The money had been returned in the night by someone on the island, which rather severely limited the possible culprits, but taking any of those people to the police would have been a cruel thing. I reiterated our position.

Jessica and I headed off in the opposite direction, down trail F, to take plot data. When we returned in the pouring rain, all seven people were in camp. I didn’t know what it meant, but thought perhaps we should go over and address them, thanking them for their cooperation and for returning the money. Jessica said no, the woman was taking a shower, and the men were all sitting around being manly. Let them be, she said. So we did.

Later, Lebon came over to the lab to talk with us.

“What will become of the people down there?” Lebon asked.

“Do they want to go to Maroantsetra?” I wondered, thinking, for some reason, that the boat that had left last night would be returning for its cloves sometime soon. No, they didn’t want to go to Maroantsetra.

“Where do they want to go?”

“They were going to Tamatave,” Lebon replied, “but, normally, you would not pay for their trip on the boat. Perhaps just a small gift for each of them?” Thankfully, he had brought up the issue of cadeaux.

“Yes, yes, of course,” I agreed. Jessica and I conferred, thinking that 10,000 each was generous. We rummaged about and found 5 10,000 FMG notes, and came back out of the lab with them, trying to hand them to Lebon.

“No, not yet,” Lebon mumbled, “after lunch, we will all go down, and you will present the gifts to them then.”

“Always a ceremony in this country,” Jessica muttered. I found the idea quaint, if somewhat unnerving. A ceremony to present gifts to people whom we had detained because one of them stole all of my money? Let it happen, just let it happen.

Later, but still before lunch, after the four detainees had left camp, the clove guardian came to the lab to speak with us. He suggested that I give him a gift for his troubles. In fact, he was the only one of the five who had not been troubled by this incident, as it was his job to stay with the cloves anyway. Jessica told him that there would be a ceremony after lunch. He wasn’t satisfied. He suggested an additional gift for himself, for his particular efforts in coming to our aid. He reminded us that he had whistled for the boat the previous night. The man was a wolf. And, I concluded then, the thief as well.

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Fisherman’s (“remote”) Camp on Nosy Mangabe, during easier times

During a lunch of rice and barracuda-esque fish, Lebon chastised me for keeping valuables in my tent, and I practiced contrition. Afterwards, we headed out in the pouring rain again. With Lebon and Fortune in massive green ponchos, we trudged through the river that had formed from the path, and finally emerged at the remote camp. Much to our surprise and dismay we found there more than 30 people, and five boats moored right off shore, in addition to the huge tarp-covered pile of cloves. All present stared at us, unabashedly.

“Do you suppose they came to see the spectacle?” I asked.

“Oh, quite probably,” Jessica responded. Lebon walked the five boat people, the two vazaha, and himself and Fortune down to the beach, where our old friends the fisher people were just pulling up. The man who sometimes sought me out in the forest to give me mangos was there, and meeting his eyes, I felt comforted. He and I both knew that this was more our home than the sailors’, even if they did outnumber us at the moment.

Jessica and I stood facing the five, and Lebon made a long pronouncement in Malagasy. It quickly became apparent that one of the many boats here was going to Tamatave, and would take the three who intended to go there. The cook no longer wanted anything to do with his old boat, but that left three more who had been detained. It seemed that full fare was required for their passage, and this had become my responsibility. Jessica asked how much, and the captain emerged from the woodwork, to say that usually it is 80,000 per person, but he would only charge us 70,000 FMG. I gasped, and tried to look faint. Meanwhile, I was trying not to stare at the captain.

The captain. A corpulent man with deep black skin, he wore a tattered white t-shirt that didn’t cover his pot-belly and had words in English on it that made no sense. “America Party Dance 100% Excellent.” Around his neck, a gold chain with a shark tooth pendant. On his fingers, chunky gold rings. On his lips, something between a sneer and a snarl. An evil looking man, and clearly a crook.

We quickly came to an impasse. Poor Jessica, always in between, was trying to make it clear that this was absurd, that it was not our responsibility to pay the exorbitant fee for these people to go to Tamatave, when all of this had happened because money had been stolen from us. We were not the culpable ones here. The captain wasn’t buying.

“If these kids,” as he referred to the guy and his girl, “aren’t your responsibility, then they should be sent to the tribunal.” He grinned at his own logic.

“No, no,” Jessica emphatically answered, “we have gotten our money back, and besides, we don’t know who took it, so it is out of the law’s hands.”

The kids, a sweet young couple whom I was convinced had had nothing to do with the theft, stood silent throughout, except for one moment of hilarity on the girl’s part when she discovered a chameleon behind Lebon. It was a female Chamaeleo pardalis engaged in the laborious process of digging a hole for her eggs, and it seemed oblivious to the gathered crowd. By this time, all of the thirty or so people had surrounded our ceremony-turned-charade. Once the Malagasy were alerted to the chameleon’s presence, however, we had to move the animal to allay their ancient fears of these slow, harmless, if otherworldly lizards.

After carrying the chameleon to a hidden spot where she could bury her eggs in peace, we resumed our negotiations. Jessica was struggling to act as both interpreter and mediator in the dispute, and I, not knowing consciously what I was doing, invoked a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. Jessica, fluent in French, and understanding some of the Malagasy spoken as well, was trying hard to make everyone happy, as was apparent to everyone. She was eager to please, presenting their proposals to me with swiftness and skill, and mine to them with the same efficacy. Meanwhile, playing like I spoke no French, I listened to what I could understand with an impassive face, then, upon having it translated, regardless of the content, scowled and cursed and said “No!” sharply several times. I stood with my arms crossed and a distant look in my eyes, except when I glanced toward the young couple, when I had to soften.

I suggested several plans of attack to Jessica, including that the corpulent shark-toothed captain and his henchmen be reminded that we were not culpable, that it was us who were robbed, not the other way around. Still, the most effective strategy I had was to stonewall. I wouldn’t respond to Jessica’s entreaties with anything but a shrug, and waited to see what kind of response that would produce in any of the other players. I didn’t hope for much from the shark-toothed captain, but thought that perhaps one of the other boats was going to Tamatave, and would propose a more reasonable price. I knew from details of the conversation I had managed to pick up that any money that we gave shark-tooth was going straight to his pocket, as there were no more taxes to be paid for additional passengers, and his boat was already going to Tamatave.

Ultimately, the standing-around-looking-grim tactic worked. The captain turned to us and said, “you are students, eh?” A very good sign. Everyone knows students are poor.

“Yes, only poor students, so you see, it is not that we don’t want to give you the money, it is that we don’t have the money.” Half true, anyway. In the long run, I could probably afford to hand over the sum he was demanding, and wouldn’t miss the cash much once I returned to a first world economy. But I was living in their economy now, and I felt that I needed the buffer of the relatively small amount of cash I had with me, in case some true emergency struck, and we needed to escape or bribe our way out of a nasty situation. Perhaps more to the point, I was stubborn, and knew I was being taken advantage of. Why did this crook deserve to unhand me of my money? That logic, though, wouldn’t get me anywhere with the captain. He needed to believe that we were impoverished vazaha, an oxymoron in this land where white skin always signaled relative wealth. The shark-toothed captain rubbed his massive belly and drew his tongue across his lips. He seemed almost contemplative, yet fiendish—the anti-Buddha.

“Well, then, propose a price,” he offered. Jessica turned to me, not betraying her surprise at this turn of events.

“What’s your best offer?” she asked me. I considered. Was this to be real bargaining, where I lowballed and he highballed and we ended up at the mean? Or was he going to take my offer seriously? Knowing the answer to this would have altered my response significantly, but I could not know. Finally, I settled on offering 100,000 FMG, which was double the cadeaux I had earmarked for the detainees. Because of the public way this ceremony had progressed, I would not have the opportunity to separately offer the young couple or the two detained sailors their cadeaux, and I did not retain much hope that the captain would share his plunder with them. Jessica was deeply uncomfortable even suggesting this number to the captain, thinking that he would consider it an insult. But the captain readily agreed.

“Just remember me next time,” he said, with a wink.

“Now, what does that mean?” I asked nobody in particular. “Are we selling our souls here?” I thought the shark-toothed captain would probably appear at some later date expecting Jessica and me to fan him while feeding him peeled grapes in our underwear. Jessica clarified with Lebon that the 100,000 was everything, and there were to be no more gifts. The captain only wished to be remembered by us the next time he was on Nosy Mangabe, recognized with a smile, perhaps a joke.

Next week: Chapter 16 – The Dread Rosalie