Genie and Paul

by Natasha Soobramanien

  Hey, said Paul. Wait.

  You’re awake.

  He’d thought Gaetan had just been leaving him to sleep, until he heard the guilt in his voice.

  I’m coming with you, aren’t I?

  Gaetan leant against the door and sighed.

  No. It’s better you stay here. You’re like a zombie, man. I think you’re scaring away the fish. And that heavy weather! It’s like taking a woman to Saint Brandon. I don’t want any more bad luck out there. Go out for a walk today.

  Gaetan lived nowhere, really. That was, the place where he lived had no name. It was a group of shacks and a shack-like shop off the side of the road between La Gaulette and Le Morne, not far from the mangrove swamps. Setting out later that morning, the rain having stopped and the wet road steaming in the sun, Paul found himself taking the Black River Coast road, drawn south to Le Morne, to the huge mass of rock which reared up from the end of the island’s southwestern peninsula.

  Gaetan had been born in the shadow of this mountain. His family had lived in a village at its base, Trou Chenille. But the village was no longer there. It was a haunted mountain, Gaetan had told Paul. The mountain was riddled with caves and its rocky overhangs were not easily accessible, leading it to become a refuge for bands of runaway slaves, the maron. There were many myths about these fugitives – it was said they practised voodoo and killed any babies born among them to stop their cries attracting soldiers. This wild place was haunted with spirits and at night their voices could be heard on the wind. If you looked up at the mountain, said Gaetan, who never did when he was out on the pirog, you could almost feel yourself being watched by spirits hidden in all those dark crevices.

  Following the road round to the north shore of the peninsula, remembering all these stories, Paul felt his chest constrict. His breathing became shallow, as though he were climbing at altitude. He felt a kind of oppressiveness in the air but no wonder, he thought: the sun was strong and the air was damp with drying rain. It was not the mountain, he told himself, walking parallel to its base along the beach, heading towards the end of the peninsula. It was not. He decided on a swim. Wading into the water, he launched himself onto his back, then lost himself in the unhurried blue of the sky. It was hazy out at sea: Paul felt as though he were looking at the world through plate glass, but so closely that his breath was misting up the glass and the world was disappearing. Then it started to rain and the colours of the sky and the sea were softened and blurred like a watercolour.

  It was as he was floating that he noticed the rock a little further out. A cross was erected on it. The site of a shipwreck, perhaps. Maybe even the wreck of the Saint-Géran, Virginie’s doomed ship. Had that sunk here? A gradual horror stole over Paul as he realised he might be swimming among the drowned, so he flipped over and front-crawled as fast as he could back to shore.

  As he staggered out of the shallows, he saw that he was no longer alone on the beach. A man was approaching him. A blan with long, matted hair – dirty blond, the colour of damp sand. He was in his late forties, Paul guessed, as he came closer.

  You’re a tourist? the man asked him.

  Sort of. Paul no longer wondered how people knew. But the man’s own speech was hesitant, as though he himself were speaking in a language not his own.

  See that? The man pointed out to the rock and the cross. Do you know why that’s there?

  Paul shook his head.

  To mark where the slaves drowned. Some of them threw themselves off this mountain rather than be caught. He squinted up at it. People drown here all the time. Trou Chenille, he said. Caterpillar Hole. It’s the name of the current.

  How odd to map areas of sea, Paul thought. Like mapping the sky. Naming currents as you would constellations.

  So no swimming here. The man smiled. You might drown. People come here to do that deliberately, you know. Is that why you’re here?

  When the man looked at him closely, Paul was suddenly gripped with the sensory meltdown that made him confuse sand with stars, and he wondered why the man’s icy blue eyes weren’t running down his face, melting like tears in the heat.

  Then the man laughed. He asked if Paul smoked ganja.

  Paul nodded.

  Good, said the man, and took out a pouch. His hands were spangled with salt and sand.

  Trou Chenille, Paul said. There used to be a village here.

  Yes, said the man. My family destroyed it.

  Tell me, said Paul.

  The people of that village, the man said, were Creole. They claimed to be the descendants of the maron. Some people say the maron are a myth. To prove the existence of a disappeared people, you point to the things they left behind. We, the living, know the dead by the things they cannot take with them. But cooking pots, utensils… weapons… nothing like that has ever been found here. And so some people declare the maron never existed. But they were fugitives! Their aim was to leave no trace or they would have been caught. Their very invisibility proves their existence. Those who deny this are people who would prefer not to preserve the memory of slavery. People like my family. Some blan claimed the land of Trou Chenille and kicked the residents out. My family bought some of that land. This all happened a few years before I was born. I did not become aware of it until I was a young man, and when I learnt the true cost of my privilege I rejected it. I live in a little shack now, in that woodland behind you. But I was born on a large and beautiful estate near the Black River Gorge. My father was born there before me, as were his father and his father and grandfather, our forefather having come to Mauritius from Brittany. Of course you know the story of Paul et Virginie. The man who wrote it was inspired to do so when he came here from France in the late eighteenth century. And my grandfather’s great-great-great-grandfather travelled with the author, Saint-Pierre, on that very same ship from Lorient. It is odd when you read Saint-Pierre’s journals. He found Mauritius inhospitably rugged and yearned for the pastoral beauty of France. And yet Paul et Virginie is his hymn to this island, which he presents as a paradise, while he savages his homeland. A man between two worlds, as I feel myself to be. Like many of his countrymen, my Breton ancestor had not intended to stay in the colonies for long, but his fortunes had been amassed at such a rate that he found it impossible to leave. Eventually, over successive generations the family shifted from being French colonials to French Mauritians. They began to feel at home on the island. Their fortunes flourished through the exploitation and oppression of the other islanders. We made ours peddling poison. Poison of the darkest kind, the whitest kind, which might as well be crystals of blood. Sugar! As a young man I left the island to study the chemical processing of sugar, which would enable my family to produce ever greater quantities of the stuff. But the place where I chose to study changed the course of my fate. I went to Brittany. As a child I had been told many stories about the place and I was fascinated by it. I was particularly obsessed with the story of the drowned island of Ker-Ys, fabled to be close to the Bay of Douarnenez, where my family had originated. Somewhere deep under the sea might lie an ancient island city! In 1965 I began my studies in Rennes and spent much of my free time travelling the region, surfing on the west coast, which I came to know intimately. It is a wild place and in many ways reminds me of Mauritius. Have you ever been to Souillac, down in the south of the island? Le Souffleur? No? It’s a rock in the sea which got its name from the whistling sound the waves used to make when they rushed through it. But the forces which shaped the rock in that way have eroded it further so that it is silent now as all rocks are, and eventually the rock itself will disappear, as all rocks eventually do. The sea there is wild. When I am there, I think of Finistère in Brittany, and whenever I was in Finistère I thought of Souillac.

  Paul was suddenly aware of the shushing of the waves as they crept up on him and retreated. The man continued with his story.

  I fell in love with Brittany, and then, towards the end of my studies, I fell in love with a Breton girl. Annick. She was a student of pol
itical science and an active member of an anarchist Breton liberationist party. Through my passion for Annick, and for Brittany, I found myself drawn into politics. Annick helped me to realise the true human cost of my privilege. And then came May 1968. Listening to the news of the Paris riots on the wireless, I thought instantly of the drowned island of Ker-Ys, my childhood obsession. There’s a Breton legend that Paris was built in imitation of Ker-Ys (from Par Ys, ‘Like unto Ys’) and a proverb claims: Pa vo beuzet Paris, ec’h adsavo Ker Is (‘When Paris is swept away, Ker-Ys will re-emerge’). Revolution and the resurrection of a mythical island were linked in my mind. Of course that was also the year that Mauritius gained her independence. I came to realise that my struggle was here. And so I left Annick, and Brittany, to return. There is not much else to tell. I got involved with a militant workers’ movement here and fell foul of hardliners who were suspicious of me as a blan and a member of the ruling class. No matter that I had cut myself off from my family and their money! I was expelled from the party. Suddenly I was adrift. Afloat between two worlds. Once again sugar turned to poison in my life, but this time it was brown, and I found myself addicted. I broke free of that by coming here. I climbed up into one of those caves up there. I lay there sweating and hallucinating for seven days and seven nights. And, after that, I awoke. Free. But trapped. You remember those books from one’s childhood whose young heroes pass freely between the worlds of reality and magic? They snap their fingers or climb into paintings and pass instantly into another realm. Then they reach adolescence and are trapped. Trapped in their own world. The realm of magic still exists, but they can no longer reach it. This is how I have felt all my adult life. I am stuck between two worlds. Or trapped in one and no longer able to access the one I long for. It is why I live here, on this haunted rock, not quite on land and not quite at sea.

  After the man had left him, Paul walked to the end of the peninsula, to the hotel there. Approaching the concierge behind the desk, he asked how he might go about making a reverse-charge phone call to London.

  My brother has died, he said.

  (vi) A Box of Taps

  They had spent every night so far drinking and talking, but neither of them had told the other much about his life. But Paul did tell Gaetan that he’d always planned to come back. Running back to London had been a mistake, he admitted, and he’d soon realised it. His sadness about Jean-Marie had been just as acute in London. Moreover, Paul had returned to a London which felt different. His own fault: things between him and Mam and Genie had changed because of his leaving them in the first place. Paul told Gaetan how, to fund his return to Mauritius, he’d registered to be a subject on a paid medical trial. That he’d been given a bed next to the man who would become his best friend. He did not tell Gaetan that the eleven-year friendship had been cemented by drugs the weekend after they’d left the clinic. Paul’s first rave and his first Ecstasy.

  To say goodbye before you leave for Mauritius, Sol had said.

  But as ‘You Got The Love’ came on, the drug had kicked in and Paul had raised his eyes to the lights which pulsed like speeded up time-lapse footage of hot-house flowers opening and closing, and what he’d thought was, Hello. And a few days later, on a visit to Genie at her new school, he’d thought the same when she’d introduced him to Eloise. So Paul had lost the urge to leave London.

  I’ll get it out of you eventually. Gaetan smiled. They were drinking again, sitting in front of the television. Paul noticed it was still covered in doilies. What was it with Mauritian guys and doilies?

  I told you, said Paul. I’m here on holiday.

  But why come back now? Yes, you tell me you have some money now. But forgive me, he said, looking Paul up and down, you don’t look very well off to me. You’ve got holes in your jeans…

  That’s the fashion in London. Paul explained how, in London, the richer you were, the poorer you dressed.

  That’s crazy! exclaimed Gaetan. What’s the point of having money and dressing like a bum? You must be rolling in it, in that case… but how did you make your money?

  Paul was spared the awkwardness of replying: disturbing images filled the TV screen and both were momentarily distracted. It was footage from a local news report in India, being replayed on the Mauritian news. Some kind of python had swallowed a calf too large to digest and was now, to its apparent shock, slowly starting to regurgitate it, its jaws unhinged in a terrible grin; the calf, limp, a raw pink, slick with the snake’s gastric juices which had dissolved its skin. Paul remarked, fascinated, that it looked as if the snake were giving birth to the calf.

  This was interrupted by a newsflash: scenes of mass looting in Baghdad, and the storming of Saddam Hussein’s palace. A man carrying a vase and fake flowers half the size of himself ran into shot, looking delirious.

  Paul laughed. What’s he going to do with those?

  Then on the local news there was an update on the progress of a young Muslim girl who had taken poison, insect repellent, for some hazy romantic reason. She had burnt her insides with the stuff but was lingering on.

  Sometimes, said Gaetan, we get news about London. Do you get news about Mauritius in London?

  Sometimes, said Paul feeling guilty.

  Gaetan mentioned the riots in Port Louis. You must have heard about those.

  I think so. Remind me.

  Four years previously, Gaetan told him, there had been a pro-ganja rally in the capital, calling for decriminalisation of the drug. Creoles who followed Rastafarianism were chief among those demonstrating, led by Kaya, the famous seggae star. He had been arrested for smoking ganja. Three days later, he had died in police custody. Head injuries. He’d fallen, apparently. Weeks of rioting followed. A state of emergency was called.

  Did you get involved? asked Paul.

  No. I wasn’t around. I didn’t even make it to the demonstration. Gaetan looked troubled by this. But the old gang – London, Chauffeur, Tilamain, everyone – they were all there. They even went looting. Tilamain grabbed this massive box. It was heavy and hard to carry, what with his hand, you know. There were some gard on his ass so he had to hide it in some bushes and go back for it the next day. He didn’t even know what he’d nicked until he opened the box.

  And what did he get?

  A box of taps.

  Paul laughed. Gaetan looked annoyed.

  Taps cost money. He managed to sell the lot for two hundred rupees.

  Gaetan shook his head and threw back his drink, and as he did so Paul could see his eyes flickering the way they did whenever he was rummaging through his memory for a story. But this time it was not a story. It was an accusation.

  You think that’s funny? A box of taps? What the fuck do you know? I wish I had been there. You know London got beaten up by the gard? I should have been there. But you want to know why I wasn’t there?

  Tell me, said Paul.

  (vii) Gaetan’s Story

  I can see it on your face. Ever since you arrived, this question, stuck like a fishbone in your throat: What happened to you? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s not a happy story, brother. I had a pretty nice life when you knew me before. I had my boat, my friends. We’d surf, we’d smoke ganja on the beach, meet with girls. And I had my music, my seggae. Playing at the hotels. But over the years it all changed. And then I went to prison. Did you know that? No, you wouldn’t. How would you? You never wrote to anyone. I sent you a letter once and you never wrote back. That London fog, fogging up your head. You forgot about us. Well, it all started to fall apart not long after you left here. In the end I lost my boat. Then came prison. After that I lost my job playing at the hotels. Oh, yes, I’m working at a hotel now, but I don’t play music there. I once did a favour for one of the managers, so when I lost the gigs he said he could get me other work. But only behind the scenes. I had a reputation. I couldn’t play for the guests any more. So now I clean their rooms. Sometimes, if people leave stuff behind, I keep it. Just stuff no one would ever notice. Yeah, like that calendar. I kn
ow it’s out of date. How you’re looking at me now, it’s different from how you used to look at me. Back when you came here. You were, what, sixteen? When I was that age, younger even, I used to surf. Tamarin. That’s where we were the first night we met, remember? Jacques who has the hostel there now – me and him and a bunch of friends, we used to surf that spot. Beautiful wave. A perfect curl. Seemed at the time that our wave would just appear on demand. We’d grab our boards and paddle out. And it’s the west coast, so evenings were the best. Riding that endless glassy left as the sun was setting. Man, it was good for the soul! That was back when there were no tourists. There weren’t many of us. We had that wave to ourselves. Then one day a small group of foreigners appeared. American guys. They were surfers. They were making a film about surfing. A blan who’d gone back to France had written about Tamarin in some big American magazine so these guys had come to see it for themselves. We were suspicious at first. But we smoked ganja with them and they told us about the film. They wanted to show the spirit of surfing, how surfing was about being in tune with nature, and about the people you met on your search for waves. They’d travelled all over the world but had never found a wave like ours. They called our island Santosha. Peace. For them, Mauritius, our wave, was mythical. Mystical. Santosha is not a place but a state of mind, they said, and we agreed. You know Le Morne, how it gives off this dark feeling? Back then Tamarin gave us just as strong a feeling, but a good one. Yeah, peace. And these guys felt it. They were cool. Real surfers. So they hung out with us there for half a year and we shared our wave, our ganja, with them. Those were good times. And then the film came out. Gradually, more surfers came to see Tamarin for themselves. Australians, South Africans. A few Americans. Even then, it was still cool. They had that spirit. That surfer’s spirit. We never had a problem with them. To come all the way out here, just to ride our wave – well, we were honoured. And they knew to share it, to show some respect. But something changed. We started getting more tourists to Mauritius. And some of them wanted to surf. They weren’t the kind of surfer we’d known before. They turned up in all the latest gear – gear! There was never gear before! We just rode on boards we’d made ourselves. These arseholes dropped in on your wave; they didn’t know how to behave. And then the blan moved in. The kind who’d never been interested in surfing before. But suddenly they started showing up on the beach, strutting about, pushing everyone around. Not so much us – the original crew – they would never have dared. Just all the tourists. We didn’t like that. But over the years, the strangest thing. The wave changed. It stopped showing up as often. Changes in the weather, the form of the ocean floor, I don’t know. The sands just shifted. Maybe the sea could sense all this bad feeling and was starting to retreat. Fewer waves. More surfers. Bad attitude. It started getting nasty. Do you remember that blan fuck you bought your weed off when we were in Tamarin the night we met? The rich boy? Well, his brother thought he was a big surfer. Those two had some nasty friends. These were the nastiest of the blan surfers down at Tamarin. They called themselves the White Shorts. They told everyone they owned the wave. How can you own a wave! They used to paddle out with knives taped to the undersides of their boards. Flash them in people’s faces. Some of my boys had run-ins with them but not me. I’d stopped surfing that spot. Before this all happened I had only ever surfed Le Morne and One Eye a couple of times but after the scene turned bad at Tamarin I started going out there more often. I was never really comfortable on reef breaks – you’ve been out with me on my pirog, you’ve seen what a wave can be; you know about the sharks. But eventually I started surfing those spots because there was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t the same. Then, after Jean-Marie died, something strange happened. I got the fear. I lost my nerve and got ground up on the reef a few times. I surfed less and less and eventually stopped altogether. I smoked more ganja. Started drinking. Over the years I got into the horses. Cards too. I lost the boat. And then one day something happened and I realised that this turf war over the Tamarin spot was my fight after all. Do you remember the anniversary of Jean-Marie’s death? Do you mark it? Oh, of course you do – it’s your birthday. Well, every year in the weeks leading up to your birthday I get especially drunk. The day of Kaya’s pro-ganja rally, I had pretty much been drunk for three weeks straight. I told you I missed the rally – well, this is why. That morning, just before we were due to meet up with the others in Port Louis, I had gone up there with Tilamain. I was sitting in James Snack with him, eating bulet. The only thing to eat when you’re hungover. In fact, I was still drunk. That’s what my lawyer said in court, though how that was supposed to help me, I don’t know. Tilamain was complaining about women troubles as usual, and as usual I was ignoring him. I was looking around the place when I saw someone I thought I recognised from somewhere. I realised then that I must know him: the man looked away too quickly. He’d recognised me, but did not want me to recognise him. I’ll tell you who it was. Do you remember that time we were fishing on Grande Rivière and this new gard followed us down and gave us shit? He searched Jean-Marie then didn’t have the balls to search the rest of us? Well, it was him, that gard. I was sure of it. I asked Tilamain. Yes, he said, it’s him. Then he goes back to his boring story, can you believe it? I’m just wondering what I’m going to do about it, when someone comes in and joins this guy. You would not believe who it was. It was him. The fucking blan. The marsan. The wannabe White Short you bought your weed off. That did it. Hey, you, I say. Everyone looks up from their bowls, including the gard and his mate. Yeah, you. You’re the gard that was hassling us that time at Pointe aux Sables, aren’t you? And all of a sudden people stopped eating, their ears burning. Some of these guys were going to the rally themselves. That cunt wasn’t even in uniform but now everything about him screamed gard – his neatly trimmed hair, his well-scrubbed face, his ironed polo shirt, the way he got up from his stool in such a panic he knocked it over as he ran out – followed by his mate the marsan. He might as well have thrown a match into a can of petrol. I ran out straight after them. I chased them both down the street but lost the gard. I caught up with the blan, though. I dragged him round the back of a garage. No one stopped me. What happened next – I don’t know how it happened. I must have still been drunk. I gave that blan the kicking of his life. I had never attacked anyone before, not even Maja who’d been begging for a slap many times before he did what he did. But I sure laid into this fuck. I was dancing about on him like fucking Fred Astaire. I was almost thrown off balance with each kick, I put so much of my weight into it. He must have been screaming, making some kind of noise, but I heard nothing. When I had finished I was panting with exhaustion, covered in sweat, like after you’ve just had a woman. Like I had just come, rolled off him, and was about to fall asleep, I was that calm. It looked like all the life had been kicked out of this blan because I had put all of myself into the kicking of him. My trainers were smeared with blood. Then I felt my arms being grabbed. Two gard. And their weaselly little colleague from James Snack. I missed the rally and I missed the riots because I was in prison. Oh, the blan paid me back threefold for what I did to him. He had gard friends, remember. And do you know who his dad is? The name was spelt out for me when I got my going-over. Do you see that my face is not the shape it was? I don’t recognise my own face in the mirror these days. I still don’t know if it was the gard I really wanted to kick in. But I missed my chance to get him. For Jean-Marie. Those blan fuckers think it’s their island. Whose sweat made their money? This island belongs to no one. And especially not to you. Everything went wrong when you came out here all those years ago, Paul. I don’t know why you’ve come back. What is there here for you? I think you should go.