MADAGASCAR’S HAUNTING MELODY

When the candle-bearing waiter suggested that the electricity might soon quit for the night, I smiled at him. The less I had to look at, the better. Madagascar had shown me enough exquisite and sad things for one day.

I had come to Andasibe, Madagascar, to see the famous indri, the lemur that sings. I had also come to escape the traffic and beggar’s prattle of the capital city, Antananarivo. Madagascar is a mixture of things beautiful and wild, and things weepingly tragic. For some reason, I had thought I could escape the latter for a couple of days, duck my nagging, Western guilt over Third World ills and wallow in nature.

But the country’s weird chemistry acts as a kind of “sight serum.” The beauty snaps your eyes open and then, as you wander around with your defenses down, you meet a dying river or a suffering soul. By midafternoon my first day in green and dusty Andasibe, I had come face to face with a human being, the coals of whose life could either flare or cool to ash. In her eyes, I saw all of Madagascar at once.

*

JUST GETTING TO ANDASIBE TESTS A TRAVELER’S ENDURANCE. TWO mornings earlier, I had trotted down through Antananarivo’s gorgeous, muddy market to the train station and found the building empty.

“There are no trains?” I asked in moldy French to the row of people smoking on the steps outside.

“No trains,” they agreed, nodding helpfully.

Although Madagascar is hoping tourism will boost it out of its abysmal poverty, the country has not paved the way for fast-food outlets and neat busloads of nature-lovers. Tourists increasingly come to snorkel and dive off the beautiful west coast beaches, to lounge on the resorty northern island of Nosy Be and to witness an astonishing wealth of peculiar plants and animals. But they come with an understanding that the road will not be a smooth one--if there is a road at all.

And so, I trotted back through the market, back up innumerable steps to the business district, back to the tourist office. Never mind that these tourism experts had told me yesterday that the train ran to Andasibe daily at 7 a.m., I now needed bus information. On the third dawn, I finally found myself at the east Antananarivo bus station. I was 10 minutes late, but 40 minutes early--rampant tardiness is one aspect of the Madagascar transportation system that sometimes works in favor of the traveler. When we bumped out of town, I was seated in the rear of a passenger van, packed between two neatly dressed gentlemen who disagreed stubbornly over how much the window should be opened. But peering between their gesticulations as we climbed the hills circling the city, I started to get the lay of the land.

For the first few miles, the creepingly narrow streets were lined cheek to cheek with wooden stands. One merchant might have a pyramid of speckled, yellow apples, while the next offered slices of French bread, and her neighbor dispensed scoops of rice from a red plastic tub. Barefoot shoppers milled around the stands and painted oxcarts wobbled aside to let us pass.

Then we dropped down the flank of the hills and headed east across the central plateau. The banks of a dike crossing an emerald swamp were dotted with drying laundry and grazing cows. On even the smallest humps of dry ground, rag tents flapped, sun-bleached symbols of Madagascar’s woes.

Like much of Africa, which lies 400 miles west across the Mozambique Channel, the 1,000-mile-long island has suffered French colonization, but perhaps it suffered more when the French departed in 1972, taking funds for schools, roads and development with them. Famous for its weird and wonderful life forms, Madagascar now has little else to offer the material world. Poverty is epidemic. The capital crawls with barely clothed children whose parents peddle rusty car parts.

Each year, rural peasants burn away more of the island’s tropical forests, racing to grow enough rice to fill new mouths. Just one-tenth of Madagascar’s original forest cover remains, and the burning brings tears to the eyes of biologists worldwide: An incredible 80% of Madagascar’s flora and fauna--including day-glo chameleons, 13 kinds of baobab tree and, of course, the cuddly, monkey-like lemurs--are found nowhere else on Earth.

We rolled on into the countryside, between skinned hills bleeding chunks of rouge soil down into gold and green rice paddies. The rivers, painted by erosion, ran in perversely pleasing shades of pink and orange. As the mountains flattened out and the paddies spread wide, the bus dropped me off at the road to Andasibe and the Perinet indri reserve. On one of Madagascar’s finer roads, it had taken almost three hours to travel 80 miles.

*

“MORA-MORA,” I HAD BEEN TOLD A FEW DAYS earlier as I sat fretting about transportation hassles at Le Buffet, the expatriate bar in “Tana,” the capital city’s user-friendly nickname. I had made friends with Joel, a Malagasy reggae musician who had undertaken the chore of teaching me to “rrrrelaxxx.” (The R is rolled; the X hisses luxuriously.) No drugs were involved, other than the wan and ubiquitous Three Horses Beer. Joel’s goal was simply to make me accept the Malagasy philosophy of mora-mora: Slowly-slowly.

I tried hard and made some progress. The beer helped. One day, I sat for hours in the zoo and botanical garden, just south of downtown, shrugging off light rain and watching the small islands full of lemurs: ring-tailed ones; bouncy gray ones; red bushy ones. But inevitably, I’d have to get up from wherever I was mora-moraing, and move. And then there was a good possibility I’d be surrounded by a small army of thin, clamoring people pushing apples, flowers, newspapers, vanilla beans, or pocket-picking diversions in my face. My jaw would tighten, my pace quicken. I knew I had hit a mora-mora plateau and that I would only make progress if I got out of town.

Now, at the corner of nowhere and the Andasibe turnoff, I was definitely out of town. There was no human sound. Birds screeched and gabbled. Water trickled. Terrestrial orchids, yellow purses of decadent sweetness, swayed at the roadside. In the heavy sun, I walked slowly, not knowing how far I would walk or even if I was going the right way. An hour later, I arrived at Hotel de la Gare, in the old train station. A quiet, smiling man gave me an iron key the size of a pistol and showed me up the massive staircase to my own little piece of the past.

The room was vast, the wood floor silky with new wax. The bed was likewise vast, and satisfyingly creaky. A plastic wastebasket was the sole token of the 20th century. In fact, the armoire smelled a bit as though Gerald Durrell, the British writer-naturalist who stayed here in 1981 when visiting Perinet, might have left a little something behind. I loved it.

I opened the windows and looked out at Andasibe. A drunken string of board houses straggled down the dirt main street. Across the railroad tracks was the train I had sought a couple days ago, having rested so long here that each car now had a tenant.

A dog barked. A pig oinked in a muffled way. Here in the gentle country, where people could at least feed themselves, the metallic banging of poverty was quieter. I lay on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. I exhaled.

*

WHEN I WOKE AT NOON, I WAS READY FOR NATURE. Mindful that the indris sing only at dawn and dusk, I nonetheless headed to the reserve. Guides are required at Perinet, so I paid Nirina, the head guide, a shocking $4 for two hours of his expertise (a week’s income for the average Malagasy), and he led me into the rich, green darkness.

Lemurs are relatives of ours, though distant ones. They represent a small branch, called prosimians, that split from the primate tree almost 60 million years ago. In geographical isolation, they thrived and diversified into at least 30 species, generally enjoying the run of the island until people showed up 2,000 years ago.

Of the lemurs, Indri indri is the largest and the most rare. One small detail of Madagascar’s complex, ancestor-oriented religion holds that a lost father and son were once rediscovered in the forest, having assumed the indri’s gray and black form. Known locally as Babakoto, or “father Koto,” indris are something like honorary ancestors. So it’s fady, or taboo, to kill them. It is not fady, though, to burn the forests they rely on. This small reserve is an exception to that rule.

Nature reserves are scattered all over Madagascar. Some suffer heavy poaching, cutting and cattle grazing. Because most of Madagascar’s flora and fauna will disappear from the planet if it disappears from these reserves, international agencies are scrambling to conduct an inventory of species. Their tallies are impressive: Madagascar boasts 1,000 species of orchids (Africa has a few hundred), and eight kinds of baobab trees to Africa’s one. The south is home to a collection of trees and shrubs called the “spiny forest.” In addition to dozens of gaudy chameleons, hundreds of frogs and jewel-toned snakes, the island hosts the tenrec--similar to a tiny, insect-eating hedgehog--and a handsome three-inch cockroach with a fearsome hiss.

After half an hour of sliding down greasy slopes, tripping on vines and hugging prickly trees while trying to scan the canopy, Nirina instructed me to mora-mora in a small clearing, and loped back into the forest. Ten minutes later, he came panting back and led me, at last, to a family of lemurs.

It took me a minute to spot them. Eventually, I realized I was looking up at the preposterously cute backside of a 40-pound, stump-tailed creature with astonished eyes like orange tea saucers. And then I wasn’t. In a wink, the indri had unfolded her lanky hind legs and popped herself into the air. A tree 30 feet away shuddered, and there she hung, placidly admiring the changed view. Another tree shuddered, and her mate came into sight. A few moments later, their half-grown lemurlet came popping along, too.

Their dense fur was black on the head and back, pale gray on limbs and fanny. They had long black feet. They grunted to each other as they looked down at us. A crowd of schoolchildren came jabbering through the forest, and the lemurs moved on.

For a while, we all followed them through the trees, the children squealing when they relocated the animals after each pop. Then the lemurs got ahead of the children, and the children went in search of other entertainment. Nirina and I climbed quietly along a hillside.

“Where do they drink?” I asked.

“They never drink,” he said. “They just eat the leaves. They never touch the ground. Well, they come out of the trees maybe every two months, to eat dirt.”

I absorbed this typically bizarre bit of Madagascar natural history and tiptoed on. Soon the trees around us were shaking again. But the lemurs were slowing down. The young one came to rest in a tree oveprhead, stretched a fuzzy arm above his head and pulled down a branch. He nibbled off all the young red leaves and stretched for another.

I squatted in the mud and watched. Nirina, bored, sat toying with sticks. The trees to our left shook, and the male appeared. Before our own tea-saucer eyes, he landed lightly on the bare red earth 10 feet from us.

He gave us a wide-eyed, appraising glance. Then he put his delicate fox-like muzzle to the earth and gnawed the dirt. For a whole minute I didn’t breathe, and then he was gone.

I looked for tracks in the orange clay where he had crouched, and found none. It was as if he had been a hallucination.

*

WE WALKED BACK IN SILENCE, SMILING. we parted at the gate, and I, moving on slowly, savored the presence of magical animals tucked into the forest around me. An afternoon rain tickled the road, big drops darkening the red dust. Still ebullient, I just stuck my camera in my raincoat and walked past the hotel and into town.

Solemn, mahogany-skinned children stared through fences and railings and chanted the word that follows white foreigners from one end of Madagascar to the other: “Vazaha. Vazaha. Vazaha.” Halfway through town was the market, and the chatter ceased as the vazaha wandered through the stalls, looking at pastel panties, orange and green cotton wraps, “Good Look” cigarettes, rice, French bread, fried snacks, plastic dishes, car parts, a few bars of Madagascar chocolate that cost as much as six pineapples. A lurching, lame woman in her 20s joined me, murmuring plaintive French. It took awhile to grasp her theme: “Stylo, Madame. Livre, Madame. Ecole, Madame.” Whether she was a teacher, a dedicated student or just demented, I didn’t know, but she tore at my indri bliss. I turned to go back to my waxed-wood sanctuary. But the sight serum was working its mischief, and I didn’t make it in time.

I stopped at a store and paid 20 cents for a pineapple. The shop was typical: A counter folded out into the street that supported perhaps three pounds of groceries. There was a small breadbox with slices of baguette; a blue enamel plate holding bits of fried chicken; a small pile of wild onions; one brown banana; a sheet of red plastic with 15 stacks of dried minnows arranged on it; a sticky glass jar of candy, and the pineapple.

The boy who took my money smiled shyly.

“You talk English?” he asked.

“Oui,” I said in a spasm of stupidity.

His face was brown-gold and completely without guile. When I asked why he wasn’t in school, he said that he had come 18 miles to mind the store for his cousin, who was sick today. And at that, the cousin appeared. If the boy was beautiful, this woman, in her early 30s, was devastating, with big waves of black hair falling around her gold face. She perched on a stool in lavender pajamas and regarded me with dark, sad eyes.

“I have fever,” she apologized, shaking my hand delicately. “You are American?”

Then she softly put the remnant of my bliss back into its Madagascar context. Her name was Sahondranirina. She had fallen in love with the wrong man--someone from an unsuitable tribe. They had a daughter, now 9, but he married someone else. The stepmother sometimes lets the girl live with her father and go to a good school in Tana. Sometimes she does not. Sahondranirina wants desperately for her daughter to get the education she missed.

“My father is dead,” she told me, resting her chin in one hand and neatening a stack of minnows with the other. “My mother told me to stop my studies and come here to take care of the store.”

She learned English by reading, listening to the radio and snatching the spoken scraps that pass through her life. The last few winters she has worked for a German botanist, traveling with him, interpreting and negotiating. She is awakening to the biological heritage of her country, but too slowly. She’s intellectually ravenous. She counts the months until the botanist returns and they go to the forests.

She is Madagascar: rich in natural blessings, but utterly bankrupt of the means to bring the potential to fruition.

Two hours passed as we talked, and then two of her brothers returned on the bus from Tana, having spent a few days futilely trying to spring another brother from the hospital. As I left the somber family, now quite somber myself, Sahondranirina asked me to come for coffee in the morning.

*

BACK AT THE HOTEL, DINNER PASSED BEFORE me like a mirage of plenty in a land of too little. Alone in the cavernous dining room, I sat with an embroidered napkin on my lap as a soundless waiter set down a platter of pork in ground cassava greens, a sculpted mountain of rice, a white ramekin of tomato-shallot salsa. When I finished dessert--a sweet scorched banana--it was almost dark: concert time in the indri’s small haven.

But I couldn’t go back to Perinet. If the soul has a limited capacity to accept newness--especially newness in the form of things that are absolutely beautiful and quite possibly doomed--my soul was straining at its seams. I knew I couldn’t hear indris without considering the possibility of no more indris.

In the morning, I had only an hour to spare, and I had to choose between the indri song and coffee with Sahondranirina. I’ll describe the indri song as best I can: It’s a bit like whale song, wild and strange, perhaps like the wail of a far-off siren. At least that’s what the books allege. I’ve never heard it myself.

Sahondranirina was feeling better, and she wrote down her address so that I could send her books. She talked about going to Germany as she took near-worthless coins from the ragged men and women on their way to work and passed them cups of coffee, bits of bread and single cigarettes.

The coffee was very dark and very sweet, and she wouldn’t let me pay.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Madagascar Basics

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Madagascar is 261. Local area code for Antananarivo is 2. Many outlying areas, including Andasibe, do not have phone service. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 3,900 Malagasy francs to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: United, Lufthansa and Air France offer daily flights from Los Angeles to Antananarivo, connecting either in Frankfurt or Paris. To get to the Perinet reserve from Antananarivo, take a van or minibus making the Antananarivo-to-Toamasina run and get off at Andasibe; about $15 round-trip. Or you can hire a car and driver for about $116 round-trip. Perinet reserve entry is $12 per person.

Where to stay: In Antananarivo: Hotel Colbert, Lalana Printsy Ratsimamanga, telephone 202-02, fax 340-12. Rate: $135. The Colbert has a fine restaurant and a good central location downtown. Hotel Radama, 22 Ave. Grandidier Isoraka, tel. 319-27, fax 353-23. Rate: $85. Smaller and friendly, with wonderful food and also centrally located. In Andasibe: Hotel de la Gare. The hotel rents modern bungalows for $18. Partly because mailing addresses can be haphazard, book with a travel agent for accommodations outside Antananarivo.

Where to eat: In Antananarivo: For safety reasons, venturing out at night in Tana is not recommended unless you take a taxi or hire an escort. The Hotel Colbert’s dining room is comparable to one in any good European hotel. Continental menu; $10-$20. The Hotel Radama’s dining room is cozy, with a small bar. Continental menu with some Malagasy dishes; $10-$15. Le Buffet du Jardin, in a park near the Hotel Colbert, is a good spot for lunch and people-watching. Sandwiches and Chinese fare, $2-$5 for two. In Andasibe: The atmospheric Hotel de la Gare offers good continental food; $8-$14.

*

For more information: Embassy of Madagascar, 2374 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C., 20008; (202) 265-5525. Visas are required; malaria pills recommended. Cortez Travel specializes in Madagascar trips and is the general sales agent for Air Madagascar; 124 Lomas Santa Fe Dr., Suite 206, Solana Beach, Calif. 92075; (800) 854-1029.