Antipode – Chapter 16

The Dread Rosalie

Mar 25, 2025

Antipode is a true account of my experiences while doing research in Madagascar from 1993 – 1999; it was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

To work in Madagascar, every vazaha researcher must help train a Malagasy student. This enforces a moral obligation to give something back to the country—in this case, an enhancement of the knowledge base. The Wildlife Conservation Society, as the administrators for the protected lands of northeastern Madagascar, had a student they wanted trained, and they were sending her to me. I didn’t know if they wanted her to learn particular skills, but I doubted it, as they themselves didn’t know what field skills I possessed. Jessica and I had both heard horror stories about researchers who had been stuck with uninterested “trainees” who learned nothing and, worse, required constant supervision, so kept the research from getting done. Rosalie Razafindrasoa was due to arrive for the final three weeks of my field season, when I was finishing my experiments and tying up various loose ends. I feared that her presence would compromise my ability to finish my research. Before her arrival, Jessica and I knew nothing of her, except that she was a graduate student at the University of Tana. We worked ourselves up by fabricating atrocious personas for her, such that we could only refer to her as the dread Rosalie.

At dinner a few nights before Rosalie was due to arrive, we asked the conservation agents when the boat would come next. We were both hoping for mail, and though getting letters to Maroantsetra from the States took several weeks, and many just disappeared into the system, if they did arrive in town, Projet Masoala sent them out to us with the boat. Uncharacteristically, Lebon was in a bad mood.

“I don’t know the schedule,” he said, glowering into his plate of rice. Then he added, “Probably sometime next week. Fortune and I are leaving to be trained.”

“Trained—has this happened before?” Jessica asked.

“Every year, two or three times a year.” He seemed proud of this.

“And will someone be coming to take your place here on Nosy Mangabe while you’re gone?” we prodded, curious as to our fate.

“Someone from Eaux et Forets, yes.” Ah, a bureaucrat from the department of water and forests come to oversee us.

“And what about Rosalie?” Jessica introduced, for the first time, the Rosalie question to the conservation agents. Lebon looked at her abruptly.

“You know Rosalie?”

“No, but we’ve been told that we must work with her,” Jessica offered. “Do you know her?”

“Yes, we know her. She worked here, doing observations on animals.”

“Observations? Behavior?” Our interest was piqued.

“Yes, behavior.” Jessica and I looked appreciatively at each other. To our knowledge, nobody had studied in-depth the behavior of any Malagasy animals but lemurs before.

“On what kind of animals?”

“Oh, lizards,” he paused, “and snakes,” another pause, “and frogs.” he concluded. It wasn’t sounding like a behavioral study after all, given the investigation of so many unrelated species. More likely, she had been conducting a survey of the fauna of Nosy Mangabe.

“And she also did conservation,” Lebon offered. He seemed to know a lot about her. So we threw him a softy, a question to which you can never say no, at least not if you’re Malagasy.

“Est-elle gentille?” Jessica asked. Is she nice?

“Oh no,” Lebon responded quickly, “not nice at all.” Jessica and I gaped at him, then laughed uproariously. We had never before heard him go against the rules of etiquette.

“Why not?” Jessica pursued.

“She captured animals without permits, and when I told her to stop, she wouldn’t, so I had to call in the authorities, and we had a trial, here on the island.”

“A trial?” This was sounding like a fantasy, or a nightmare, it was hard to tell which.

“Yes, and she was not very nice at all.” He was sure of this, at least.

“So you’re going to be gone when she’s here?”

“Yes, both of us,” he said, motioning at Fortune. The faceless Rosalie irritated the usually unflappable conservation agents so much that they were being protected from her very presence. My curiosity was growing.

Lebon and Fortune were whisked away to their training early one morning, and we had received word that Rosalie and an interim conservation agent would arrive within hours. Instead, fog closed in around our little island, and by early afternoon, we were alone in the Universe. Jessica and I were all that remained in a gray, drizzly world, with only the surf softly reminding us of a moon, somewhere. The boat that was supposed to arrive bearing Rosalie failed to materialize. For two days our little island lay suspended in fog. There was no world outside of us and the forest, and all it contained—frogs, chameleons, kingfishers, ruffed lemurs calling from the summit, a troop of brown lemurs overhead. All was insular. A paradise fly-catcher flitted overhead. Lemurs leapt from one tree to the next, greedily grabbing water-apples as they ripened. In the night, wild pigs arrived in camp, grunting, digging deep holes everywhere. I hadn’t believed before that there were any pigs on the island at all.

Finally, the dread Rosalie arrived. With her came Yves, the boat captain, who was to act as conservation agent until Lebon and Fortune returned. Rosalie, we quickly learned, is a thoroughly middle class, educated, 24 year old woman from Fianarantsoa, on the haut plateau, whose father directs the “normal” school, the regional equivalent of an American junior high. She had been training to be a teacher before deciding that biological research was her true passion. Jessica and I remained wary of her, even as she flashed her big smile, busied herself setting up her tent, and quickly made herself available to be taught. It was still utterly unclear to me what I was supposed to train her to do.

“How many species have you collected?” she asked us the day she arrived. It is a common misunderstanding among the scientifically-inclined in Madagascar, that all biological field work must inherently rely on systematic collections. This consists of finding as many different species within a particular group as possible, then preserving them in alcohol (pickling), so that you or others may later look at them at your leisure. It was not Rosalie’s fault that this was all she knew, but it is difficult to overcome the belief that field work and herpetology are comprised exclusively of collecting and pickling. I realized that one service I could offer was to show her a different kind of field work, another line of scientific inquiry which did not involve accumulating vast numbers of species, but rather coming to understand one or a few species very well.

I began by explaining the basics of behavioral field work to Rosalie, including the concept of the focal watch, during which the observer watches just one animal, for a period of time that can seem to go on forever. Part of the problem in training someone in this kind of field work is that it is necessarily solitary and silent work—to learn anything of the animals, you must be still for long periods of time, and let the patterns of what they do reveal themselves. This is not an activity easily taught—either you have the patience and observational skills to discern pattern, or you do not. Unlike the surveys Rosalie was used to, where teams of people moved through the forest catching animals, then reconvened to “key them out” (identify the species), this work did not involve chasing, collection, or identification of species. I couldn’t include her in my experiments, as they were already well underway, and their integrity would be compromised had I inserted a new researcher into the mix now.

But as I explained the focal watch to her, she became visibly excited, so I suggested that she go out to a bamboo stand that we monitored, and conduct a focal watch of a marked frog to see what she could see. She came back to camp excited an hour later. She had seen a female rebuff an attentive male.

“People should study behavior of everything,” she said. I had made sure to warn her that this work can at times be quite boring. Watching frogs can feel like a never-ending task. But she took to it. Both Jessica and I were beginning to like and respect her, and thereafter I dropped the descriptor. Dread Rosalie no longer, unless she should earn it.

In addition to patience and observational skills, a good behavioral biologist also needs a solid theoretical background. I asked Rosalie what courses she had taken in evolution or ecology, either as an undergrad or as a graduate student. She seemed stumped by the question. In her experience, there were no such courses at the University. Rosalie had never been introduced, formally or informally, to the basics in her own field, and claimed no knowledge of evolution at all. I decided that this, at least, I could try to teach her.

Because my French wasn't up to the task of giving lectures, I asked Jessica if she wouldn't mind translating a short lesson every day. When I asked Rosalie if she would be interested in such a thing, she was exuberant.

For our first lesson, I began not with Darwin, for Rosalie had heard of him, but with the modern synthesis, which was an ambitious and successful attempt by biologists in the 1930s to combine evolutionary theory with new advances in genetics. I then introduced her to the four forces of evolution, all of which have the power to alter gene frequencies in a particular gene pool: mutation (direct genetic change), gene flow (movement of organisms into or out of populations, thus changing the frequencies of genotypes in those populations), genetic drift (differential reproduction of particular genotypes due to chance events), and selection (non-random differential reproduction). Previously, Rosalie knew only of mutation.

The next day’s lesson was on natural and sexual selection, where my own interests were focused, and Rosalie’s enthusiasm and wit turned it into a conversation.

“Selection shapes the forms and sounds and rituals of all organisms,” I began. “From the very beginning of humanity’s study of evolution, Darwin was talking about two different kinds of selection. Every living organism must survive, which is accomplished through a process he called natural selection. And reproduce—that’s sexual selection.”

“You have to survive, obviously, but reproduction…?” Rosalie asked for clarification.

“Without reproduction, the individual’s gene line stops, and won’t be represented in future generations,” I explained. “So selection can’t act on those genes any more, and they are lost forever.” Rosalie scribbled in her notebook.

“The two selections are often viewed as distinct because they cause animals to do different things,” I continued, “Under natural selection, we expect both sexes to attain their goals in similar ways, through acquiring food and shelter. Under sexual selection, though, there is marked sexual dimorphism—the two sexes may accomplish their objectives by different means.”

“Like how?” Rosalie asked, looking up from her note-taking.

“Think of the peacock,” Jessica suggested, invoking a classic example of sexual selection. “Its tail attracts peahens, but it also makes it more difficult for the peacock to escape from predators. That big, bright tail makes him more likely to reproduce, but less likely to survive.” Rosalie didn’t look convinced.

“If the tail isn’t good for him, why do females prefer it?” Rosalie asked. She had hit upon a central question in evolutionary biology: how do sexual and natural selection reconcile with one another? I smiled, in part to hide the fact that I had no idea how to answer her question in a way that would satisfy her.

“We really don’t know,” I admitted. “Females do prefer larger tails on peacocks, and those larger tails do have a survival cost. But why females have that preference has been hotly debated for years, and there’s not one good answer that everyone can agree on. We’re still trying to work it out.”

“Really?” Rosalie asked, stunned to hear that Western science still had some things to learn.

“Really,” I confirmed. “But we do know some things. For starters, in most animal species, females are limiting for males,” I began.

“What is ‘limiting’?” Rosalie asked, pen poised.

“It means there aren’t enough of something, like females. In this case, it means that males could reproduce more if there were more females.”

“Why is that?” she pursued.

“Because the more matings any given male can get, the higher his chance of successfully reproducing. Increasing the number of matings a female gets, however, doesn’t significantly increase her chance of reproducing. From the males’ point of view, there aren’t enough females to go around,” I concluded. Rosalie had stopped writing, and was just looking at me.

“Consider humans, before birth control,” Jessica said. “A man who has sex with 20 women in one year has a chance of fathering 20 children; a woman who has sex with 20 men in one year can only become pregnant once.” This made more intuitive sense, and Rosalie nodded, and picked up her pen again.

“So,” I continued, “the asymmetry between males and females, regarding how many offspring can result from multiple partners, leads to similar ones in behavior and strategy as well.” Rosalie was writing furiously. “Because females are limiting for males, females are likely to choose among potential mates. Males, however—except for human males—are not usually apt to be choosy. Instead, males tend to compete amongst themselves, to impress females, or to control resources, like food, that females need.”

“So,” Jessica summarized, “costly traits like the peacock’s tail can be maintained in two ways: by female choice, or by male-male competition.”

“Male-male competition tends to be showy, with big or loud displays,” I said. “Male moose butting heads and antlers. Roosters crowing at each other. Male elephant seals viciously attacking other males who come near their harem.”

“But what about female choice?” Rosalie asked, intense. This she wanted to hear more about.

“Female choice is just as, if not more important, than male-male competition. It’s not as photogenic, though. That makes it harder to identify. Typically, females choose mates by approaching the one they’ve identified as their favorite, and making it clear that they’re sexually receptive,” I said.

“How do females identify their ‘favorites’? What do they look for?” Rosalie pursued.

“Females may make their choices based on some resource that the male is offering—a food source he defends, or paternal care he will give to his offspring.” I explained. “But more frequently, females seem to choose mates on the basis of their genetic quality…”

“How does a female recognize genetic quality?” Rosalie asked. “Humans can’t assess that, can we?” I smiled. She was identifying so many important questions.

“Genetic quality usually can’t be gauged directly,” I conceded. “But an animal’s genotype—all of its genes—produces its phenotype—all of its observable properties, including size and color.”

“So,” Jessica explained, “assuming a good correlation between observable, phenotypic traits, and hidden genes, females can assess males’ genetic quality on the basis of their size, or call. In many frogs, for instance, the most complex calls, or those at a particular frequency, are the most attractive to females.”

“Female gladiator frogs choose males on the basis of both their calls and their nest, which the male builds and maintains,” I said. “And in some poison-dart frogs, females choose males that defend the best territory, because those territories contain bromeliads which are necessary for their tadpoles’ survival.”

“About those poison-dart frogs,” Jessica interrupted, “Why did you stop working on them? ”

“What are these frogs? Where did you work on them?” Rosalie asked me, curious.

“They’re little, toxic, brightly colored frogs, like Mantella, but found in Central and South America,” I answered. “I switched partly because the poison-dart frogs were already quite well studied, but also because the poison-dart frogs provide an example of just one lineage that has evolved many complex behaviors in response to being poisonous, colorful, and diurnal. I knew that if we found similar behavior in the Mantellas, here in Madagascar, that would provide a wholly new data point, and suggest convergent evolution between the two groups.”

“Interesting,” Rosalie reflected, nodding to herself. “But are frogs the only animals that have female choice?” She was chiding us for our preoccupation with the leggy critters. We laughed.

“No, of course not,” I said. “Most animals have some sort of mate choice, although a lot of it is difficult to understand. In some bower birds, females choose males on the basis of how many blue things they have acquired.”

“Blue?” Rosalie asked, to be sure she had heard me right.

“Blue,” I repeated. “You might wonder, why blue?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at me intently.

“Well, blue things are rare in nature, so presumably more difficult to find than, say, green leaves, at least in the forests where these birds live. It’s difficult to acquire and keep blue things, because they’re rare, so females can look for males with the most of them as a way to assess their quality.”

“But it seems so random,” objected Rosalie.

“It does, doesn’t it,” I agreed. “Again, how these processes get started is still a bit of a mystery. Why do females like blue, if it doesn’t help them survive, or have better offspring?”

“Isn’t one thought that males who have the skills to acquire a lot of blue things have sons who can do the same thing?” Jessica asked. “So the sons, like their fathers, will be sexy, and attract mates.” Rosalie smiled at this. Like father, like son; if senior is a catch, so too will be junior. After a pause, she tried to bring some of the theory she had learned back to real organisms.

“So what do you think Mantella laevigata is choosing?” Rosalie asked.

“That’s a large part of what I’m hoping to figure out,” I said. “A couple of months ago we didn’t know anything about these animals. I think,” I said cautiously, “that females are looking primarily for good wells, into which they can lay their eggs. But they might also be looking for some aspect of male quality I haven’t found yet. These males fight a lot, and call, which begs the question—why? Fighting and calling, like all activity, is energetically costly, so if they weren’t adaptive in some way, they would be lost…”

“Why is that?” Rosalie asked.

“If fighting was really non-adaptive, the animals that conserve energy by not fighting would thrive more than those that wasted energy with fights. Given that animals do call and fight, then, there must be a reason. Why call? Why fight? That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said. Rosalie seemed satisfied with that answer, but later approached me with a question that had apparently begun to plague her.

"Why do you have to bring selection, or evolution, into this at all? Why not just study behavior?" My multi-pronged answer included a discussion of the importance of a theoretical background to all empirical work, having a framework in which to interpret the pattern you observe.

"Okay, then if you're going to study selection, how do you know what traits to look at?" she asked. How indeed. She was landing on all of the landmines that were salient to me, as someone engaged in this research.

"That's a large part of defining your research question," I admitted, "and one that we don't talk about much. It helps if you can find an obvious morphological trait, one that the animal uses to interact with its environment in food acquisition, territorial defense, mate getting, or the like. Basically, you need to watch animals for a good long time before you form an idea of what to monitor for the effects of selection."

Rosalie continued to go into the forest, mostly to bamboo stand six, and watch frogs. Early on, her disbelief that this was really what we did led to an interesting mistake. I had suggested that she try to observe a single frog in stand six all afternoon, to get her used to what it is that students of animal behavior spend most of their time doing. Apparently unable to believe that this was what I was suggesting, she remembered that one of the other things we did in stand six was take data on all of the marked bamboo wells. Every three days we took data on water level, frog activity, and numbers of eggs, tadpoles, and parasites in each well. On this day, Rosalie walked from well to well in stand six and repeatedly took data on all of them.

Her persistence proved valuable. The following day, Rosalie told me that, for three days, she had been watching a well in stand six that had more eggs in it every day. It had been raining almost constantly. I knew that, five days earlier, just before she started her observations, there had been a large, almost fully metamorphosed tadpole in that well. It had left just before she arrived, and now she reported that eggs had been showing up in great numbers ever since. Two things were probably in play: the tadpole had been eating some number of eggs, so those that would have been eaten were now free to develop. More interesting, females may be unwilling to deposit in a well with a tadpole. Once it metamorphosed, though, what had been a very bad place to lay eggs now became a very good place, as it had a demonstrated ability to produce young frogs. Perhaps selection had enabled females to discern the difference, and the newly hospitable well became a place females descended upon to mate in. That Rosalie was a good observer is but one more piece of evidence that she was going to be an excellent scientist.

She was concerned, though, that she wasn’t working hard enough to please me. I found it difficult to explain that I had no such expectations, and that if she was learning, that was success. At lunch one day, after she lowered her head for her customary moment of silence, she asked if we would be working the following day. Jessica, well familiar with the schedule, explained what wells we would be taking data from, and which experiment we would be working on, before noticing that Rosalie looked a bit shocked.

“You work on Sundays?” she asked, in a small, plaintive voice. That stopped Jessica short, as she, like me, has no religion, and we worked every day the weather allowed.

“Yes, we do, but you don’t have to,” I interjected.

“Are you sure?” Rosalie asked, clearly concerned that I might think her lazy.

“Yes, of course,” I assured her.

Later I was sitting on the dock with my photo equipment, trying to capture some of the magic of the mid-afternoon light over the bay. I had a camera body, with a zoom lens on it, mounted on a tripod. Rosalie seemed interested, so I had her look through the viewfinder. I zoomed the lens in and out, then swiveled the camera on the tripod, so she could see a variety of views.

“Does it use film?” she asked me. I didn’t know how to answer. I’d been interacting with her as if she had seen cameras and knew of their basic functioning. This was well before digital cameras were common, even in the developed world. Now I wondered if this was the first camera she had ever seen, but didn’t want to make her uncomfortable by asking. By this time, Jessica had joined us on the dock. Rosalie, pointing at my hair, asked Jessica another odd question.

“Is this blonde?” she wanted to know of my usually distinctly brown hair, which was now a bit lightened from the months of tropical sun. Jessica looked unsure for a moment, then responded.

“No, definitely not.” Rosalie looked slightly disappointed.

“I’ve only seen blonde people in photographs,” she said. “I thought Erika might be blonde, even though she doesn’t look quite like the pictures.”

Our lessons continued, and Rosalie persisted in surprising me with her intuition for the material. She kept me on my toes with her questions, asking about the evolutionary origins of the sexes one day, the nature of sex determination the next. Jessica, of course, was a natural at this material, and between them, my brain was tested regularly.

One day we discussed the impact of ecology on mating systems—what determines if a population of animals is monogamous, say, or polygynous? I based this discussion on a seminal 1977 paper by the biologists Emlen and Oring. One of their main points, revolutionary at the time, is that females choose their level of association with one another based on parameters such as distribution of food resources. The social system that results is largely a matter of how individual males respond to female spacing—if females are clumped in space, a single male can often control multiple females, and polygyny evolves. If females are all fertile at essentially the same moment during a brief mating season, however, polygyny is less likely—one male cannot monopolize all fertile females simultaneously. At the end of my lesson, Rosalie, as usual, had questions.

"Is the implication that, as parameters of the environment change, so too might the mating systems of animals that rely on those parameters?" After hearing a cursory review of their arguments, she had identified the take-home message that I believe Emlen and Oring wanted their readers to intuit. Here was a woman who was a natural at the logic of evolutionary biology, but would never have the opportunity to truly explore that talent, simply because of where she had been born.

Rosalie continued with her questions, asking about sexual versus asexual organisms, and we discussed hermaphroditic and clonal species. We talked of trees that, when they are isolated, can self-fertilize when they don't receive another individual's pollen, and of polygynous fish that, when the male dies, the dominant female turns into the resident male.

At the end of all these questions, Rosalie said, “I’m not very good at biology.” It was such a ludicrous statement that I had to laugh.

“Oh, that’s clearly not true at all.” She shook her head.

“No, really I’m not. I never remember the names of things.” What a common and sad misconception this is: that it is the drones who make the mind-numbing effort to memorize all the terms as soon as they are uttered who are good at science, whereas the people who think conceptually and creatively, as Rosalie clearly was, are somehow inferior. I had to correct her impression.

“No, it doesn’t take much intelligence to memorize things. With time, when you’ve heard the terms enough, you will remember them. What takes intelligence is to really understand, and that is what you do so well.” She looked down, slightly embarrassed. Then, abruptly, she asked a wholly different sort of question.

“What is homosexuality? Is it a disease, or a choice, or...what?” She was very nervous about this, and it seemed to weigh on her. I wanted to know where her interest came from, so we pursued it. It soon came out that Rosalie had a friend at University who was a lesbian. Rosalie was concerned that the woman's group of friends were at some risk of turning into lesbians as well. She seemed to have created a schema for homosexuality that involved an infectious agent. I tried to allay those fears, and we discussed some of the scant evidence for genetic bases for homosexuality. We also talked about the fact that people tend to be very adamant about it not being a choice, often saying they have known since they were very young.

“I think with her, it was a choice,” Rosalie said.

I shook my head. "When you say that to many homosexuals in the States, they say to you, ‘why would I choose this? Look at all the difficulties it causes for me. What are the advantages?’" Then I asked her more about her friend, and found that they are not still friends, but only because the other woman moved away. When they first knew each other, during Rosalie’s first year at University, she wasn’t yet out. The concept of being out was new to Rosalie, which probably contributed to her viewing her friend's apparent transition as a choice. Then Rosalie revealed the most awful part of the story, as if the naiveté of the college girls wasn’t sad enough.

Several elders in the community began asking all of this woman’s friends, including Rosalie, why she became a lesbian.

“What happened to her?” they demanded of Rosalie, and others. “Why is she doing this now, to herself and to everyone around her? You should tell her to stop.” The elders demanded of these students to explain why a friend was homosexual, and encouraged them to confront her. This only confused Rosalie and her friends more. She understood so little what any of it meant, even what a lesbian was, that she hadn't been sure what to believe.

After months in the field, the season was drawing to a close. On my last Friday night on Nosy Mangabe, the horizon put on another show, tall streaked clouds tinged with yellow, wispy flat clouds in pinks and blues, the thinnest line of bright yellow-orange lying atop the thunderheads to the north. Surrounded by all of this beauty, I was itching to get out of there. I wanted to be home, and not have to face my moldy tent or cuts that refused to heal or naked sailors in the forest anymore.

But even now, I was discovering new elements of my system that fascinated. I had established artificial wells in the forest, to assess whether wells were limiting for my frogs. Like females for males, a limiting factor is any critical resource that exists at a suboptimal level, thus slowing the growth of either individuals or populations. If, in this forest, the number of frogs was restricted by the number of wells, then wells were limiting for these frogs.

In my artificial wells, we found several unexpected species moving in, including a tiny little frog called Anodonthyla boulengeri. After a male and female Anodonthyla mated inside a well, almost filling the space with their eggs, the father remained with the eggs until they hatched, then stayed with the tadpoles until they metamorphosed. On several occasions, I saw attending fathers somersault around the eggs in their wells, cycling over and around their eggs. I suspect this served to aerate the water, and keep the eggs breathing.

Back in camp, though, relationships were getting more difficult. Lebon and Fortune had returned, and the animosity between them and Rosalie was clear. I didn’t want to take sides, even though I had made a friend in Rosalie in just a few weeks, while the conservation agents had remained enigmas for months.

It was my birthday a few days before we were due to leave, a fact I made little of, but which Jessica and Rosalie took seriously. When I got up that morning, I found on the table in the lab a carved wooden dolphin, and a poem. Jessica had whittled the dolphin while doing focal watches, and written the poem about our life on Nosy Mangabe, as personal a reflection of those months as I could imagine. Every nuance was perfect. Soon our time together would be over, and I had pangs of regret for that, even as I was glad to be going home. Then, as I returned from brushing my teeth at the stream, Rosalie stopped me in my tracks.

“Happy birthday!” she announced, and proceeded to kiss me in the Malagasy (originally French) way, on both cheeks. She had a small speech prepared, about how she hoped very much that I would be successful and happy in finishing my doctorate. Then she presented me with a music tape, of a band from Fianar, her hometown. I was touched, and a bit embarrassed, by her generosity.

Later, Rosalie took it upon herself to make me a birthday treat. Having but one egg, some flour, sugar and oil, and a wood fire, she managed to make things closely resembling donut holes, with no donuts in evidence. They were extraordinarily delicious, although Lebon made a point of denigrating them, and Jessica and I both made ourselves slightly ill gorging ourselves after months of rice and fish broth.

As we made preparations to leave over the next few days, it became clear that Rosalie would shortly be seeing her sipa, the Malagasy word she used to describe her long-time mate but not husband. She never used his name, just called him her sipa. What a wonderful word, I thought, and we don’t have an analog in English. Boyfriend sounds juvenile, and under represents the seriousness of the commitment after a while. Partner is more often used to describe a romantic interest of the same sex. Significant other—too clinical.

“How do you say sipa in English?” Rosalie asked me.

“I don’t think we have the word in English.” She was dubious, then surprised, once she believed that I didn’t simply misunderstand her question.

“Why not?” Her simple questions were often the hardest.

“I think some concepts are best described in particular languages, and the attempts of other languages to describe the same thing are never quite as good. Sipa is a good example of a Malagasy word that is perfect, sounds beautiful, a word the whole world could use comfortably. Also, tsangatsangana—to take a walk, a stroll, a little hike.” Rosalie laughed. She couldn’t believe that I thought there were words in Malagasy that were better than the alternatives in other languages. But Malagasy, in particular, often uses onomatopoeia to convey meaning—tsangatsangana almost sounds like a slow lope, an easy gait.

“How about, ‘bon appétit,’ in French?” she began rifling through her language stores now.

“Yes!” I agreed. She was always a quick study. So many times people have asked me in Madagascar how you say “bon appétit” in English. At first I searched for words, but now I know: it’s bon appétit.

“Also, bon voyage,” she continued.

“Another one—in Spanish: macho. Swaggering men trying to prove how manly they are. No other language I know has as good a word.” She wasn’t familiar with macho, but later used it to describe Lebon as he chopped wood. Now she owned the word, just like she owned so many biological concepts previously unknown to her.

The day before we left Nosy Mangabe, I took pictures of Lebon and Fortune to send back to them, and they proved to be complete hams in front of a camera. Lebon posed with a book, looking pensive. Fortune giggled under his flowered hat. They broke out equipment I had never before seen—a transect tape, some flagging—climbed a boulder with it, and pretended to be hard at work. After the photo shoot, I gave them a few things I would not be taking home with me, for which they might have some use, but also offered them real gifts.

“When I come back, next year, or the year after, is there anything you would like me to bring for you?” Lebon considered this seriously for a while, but Fortune knew immediately. He pointed to my hiking boots.

“Shoes, like yours.” Fortune didn’t have anything but flip-flops, so we measured his feet, and I told him I would get him boots. Lebon, always the showman, wanted a couple of nice shirts, “ones with collars.”

Finally we left Nosy Mangabe, but it would be a long time yet before I saw home. That first night off the island, I took Rosalie, Jessica, and the good doctor, who turned out to be an old friend of Rosalie’s, out to dinner at the Coco Beach. We talked of birth control and AIDS, and the good doctor admitted that though the Malagasy government denies the existence of AIDS in their country, it is there, alive and well. He sees it, even in the small hamlet of Maroantsetra, especially in the women rented by infrequent white tourists. We talked of the children that result from these unions, and Rosalie and the doctor were surprised to hear that single women have babies in the States, too. Rosalie and Jessica both insisted on flattering me with compliments, which embarrassed me, but also left me with pride that I had impressed on these two young women what you can do if you try. They both have such enormous potential as biologists, which Jessica will surely realize, but Rosalie may not, simply because of where she was born. She sees this injustice, and feels powerless to combat it. It is simply true that it is easier to “do what you want,” as she put it, if you happen to be born American, than if you are born Malagasy.

Next week: Chapter 17 – Descending Back to Reality