There are things you don’t learn in school. My father, for instance, never helped us with math, but he taught us something far more useful: how to live with a spirit. A glass of water placed on the door lintel, always full, always fresh. The house impeccable, every object in its place. The toilets so clean you could have had tea in them. A flowerbed in pots, cleaned every Sunday, rain or shine. And the trash, taken to the communal bin at the end of the street, without exception, even in pouring rain. These weren’t the whims of a maniac. They were rules of cohabitation. The kind of lease you don’t sign at a notary’s office but respect to the letter if you want to sleep soundly.
We lived on the ground floor of a two-story house, in a neighborhood where no one spoke of such things except in hushed tones. At home, everything was fine. The house was clean, the water flowed on the lintel, and the spirits moved nothing. We lasted sixteen years, which in that house was less about perseverance than an Olympic record. Because on the floors above, tenants were just passing through. A few weeks, sometimes a few months, rarely more. Tables moved, chairs changed places in broad daylight. People would come to ask us for advice, faces drawn, suitcases already half-packed. We told them: clean, tidy up, put out water. They nodded politely. They left anyway.
The whole neighborhood knew the house was haunted. It is the only thing the entire district is still unanimous about today. And yet, for us, this house was a blessing. My father’s business never did as well as it did within those walls. It just goes to show that a well-treated spirit doesn’t necessarily wish you harm. You just need to know the rules. The problem is that no one else wanted to learn them.
Since my parents left, the house has been empty. A dozen years without a tenant. The landlord never lowered the rent, mind you. He didn’t need to. The spirit took care of it. No real estate agency in the world scares off clients with such consistency. No construction work, no water damage, no noisy neighbors. Just a chair out of place in the morning and a silence a bit too thick to be normal. A dozen years of lost rent. You could say it’s the most loyal and ruinous tenant in the history of Malagasy real estate. He pays nothing, never leaves, and discourages everyone else.
A few days ago, while on vacation on an island on the east coast, the thing caught up with us. Shadows in the bedroom, especially near the mirror. My partner and I saw the same thing, felt the same thing, without speaking of it in front of the children. We removed the mirror. The shadows calmed down. A reflex inherited from my father, probably: when the invisible moves in, you don’t scream, you don’t run, you negotiate the furniture.
In Madagascar, everyone knows a house like that. Everyone has an uncle, a grandmother, a neighbor who moved for reasons no one names at the office but everyone understands over evening rice. We live in a country where the real estate market obeys laws that economists have not yet modeled. Location, surface area, status: all that counts, of course. But the decisive criterion, the one that appears on no advertisement, is knowing if the house is ‘calm’. And ‘calm’ here doesn’t mean without noise. It means without uninvited guests.
And if you are looking for an apartment in Antananarivo, a piece of advice: when the landlord tells you the house is calm, ask him to specify since when, and especially since whom.
Sometimes, I happen to pass through that neighborhood. The house is still there, closed, empty, as the rest of the world sees it. But when I pass by, I slow down. There is that corner, near the fence, where my father used to smoke his cigarette while watching passersby. He has not been of this world for years. Yet, every time I pass the house, I feel him. The silhouette leaning against the wall, the cigarette at his fingertips, the calm gaze on the people passing by. Like before. Perhaps he has returned to check if the house is still clean. After all, he is the one who taught us that spirits don’t leave. They go home.
Captured & Published at: 2026-08-29 05:39:09 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/08/le-locataire-du-dessus.html