Voyager

by Russell Banks

  From what I’d gleaned of Seychelles’ recent history, this was no small feat. From the mid-1960s until shortly after independence, in 1976, Seychelles politics was run by the flamboyant, even grandiose, James Mancham, the nation’s first president and the leader of the Seychelles Democratic Party. Sir Jim was friend to starlets, to celebrities, and to Adnan Khashoggi and various petroleum potentates, many of whom had bought huge tracts of land and pushed for big-time tourism. Mancham’s prime minister was France-Albert René, a left-leaning young lawyer who’d founded the Seychelles People’s United Party (SPUP) and had formed common cause with Mancham in order to obtain independence for Seychelles. Then, in 1977, while Mancham was in London attending a conference of Commonwealth leaders, René and a small force of Tanzanian-trained Seychellois carried out a nearly bloodless coup.

  Under René, the economy foundered, capital fled the country, and tourism all but disappeared. In November 1981, there was a widely reported and badly botched countercoup attempt led by the ex–Congo mercenary colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare. A troop of British and American mercenaries entered the country disguised as a South African rugby team, carrying automatic weapons and grenades in their suitcases. There was a failed mutiny of NCOs in the Seychelles army in 1982, then several more coup and assassination attempts, but despite all, René stayed in power.

  He was coming now to the midpoint of his third five-year term, which was all he was permitted under the constitution. Though he seemed less the Marxist dictator he was sometimes called than a paternalistic socialist unwilling to delegate power, clearly Seychelles government was his show and had been since 1977. His strong, far-seeing policies for preserving the precious and fragile Seychelles environment and carefully developing the tourist industry were as enlightened as those of any government anywhere. It was easy to see, however, that the government and René’s SPUP were extremely involved in the daily business of every citizen, and not all of them liked it.

  The following morning I took a long, easy walk, hardly a hike, from Bel Ombre, on the west coast of Mahé, to Anse Major. While I walked, I picked up mangoes and custard apples from the ground and stashed them in my pack. The trail wound through jungle and fields of rose apple, along high black cliffs overlooking the sea below. It rained off and on, but no matter, as I was soaked in five minutes from sweat anyhow. I had parked my Mini Moke in a yard where the road ended, then walked for two hours to reach the beach. The only people I met were a local man and his two small boys in the jungle gathering coconuts, splitting off the outer husks on a sharpened stake on the ground. The man gave me a nut, and I slipped it into my pack and moved on. Where’s the serpent in this garden? I wondered, as I walked along a winding narrow path beneath towering palms. Silent, solitary hiking is practically religious. Once you’re into it and tired, your thoughts gradually replace the world, and you become a transcendentalist.

  At a perfect small arc of a beach, there was a palm-frond lean-to, and I crawled under it to get out of the rain, reading a week-old London Observer I’d found in Victoria that morning, and ate my mango and custard apple and coconut. Strange, but lovely, to be stretched out under a Robinson Crusoe–style lean-to eating a lunch of fallen fruit and nuts, reading about the Redgrave sisters opening in London in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a fine warm rain falling, waves crashing at my feet. Soon the sky cleared, and I dried my clothes on a branch, swam, read a bit more, and wandered the beach and rocks for hours. There was no one else in the world, and it was wonderful.

  At some point that day, much later—time had started to melt for me—the Blue Marlin, a charter fishing boat out of Beau Vallon, pulled into my bay and anchored. A fat lobster-red man in shorts jumped into the water and swam ashore. He was a Colonel Blimp type, British, who popped his eyes with delight when he saw my Observer and the front-page photos of England in snow. He grabbed it from my hands and sat on my rock, cruising through the news. Then abruptly he plunged back into the water and swam to the boat, clambered aboard, jovially waved, and took off, leaving me to my lovely solitude for the remainder of the day. Leaving me to the natural world—sea and sand and rocks and trees. Birds and lizards and sand crabs were my only companions. I was becoming a misanthrope.

  That night, after a late dinner alone at the Northolme, I sat out on the terrace listening to the sea break against the rocks in the darkness below and fell into conversation with Rick Howatson, the dive master, who had stopped off on his way home from the Japanese restaurant located north of Victoria on the east coast of Mahé. He was unusually white-faced. He told me that tonight after he’d finished dinner the restaurant owner had brought out a tray of liqueur bottles, each with an odd, organic-looking object marinating in the liqueur. Rick had chosen the one that looked least harmful, he said. In fact, it tasted fine, but when he had drunk it off he was told that he’d chosen the liqueur with sliced deer’s penis in it. All the bottles had animal penises in them, different types—some whole, some sliced. Rick had blanched and gagged, but kept it down all right, he said, but he now felt the need for a party. One would soon be in full swing at his house.

  At first I declined his invitation, but a while later, after he’d gone—confusing solitude with loneliness—I got into my Mini Moke and made my way to his house. It was a garish white hilltop palace with a pool, three dogs, miscellaneous cats, several local teenage hangers-on with guitars, the Australian I’d been talking to at the Coral Strand the other day, and his wife or girlfriend, a very young black Seychelloise woman. It was the sort of house you’d expect a successful rock group to rent and wreck in Laurel Canyon. There were Steve Ambrose from the casino, another dive instructor named Avi, who was a South African Israeli, and his British wife, who was very pregnant, and a half-dozen others who looked like Europeans and North Americans, not locals.

  It was not a good party. For a few hours, folks stood around and drank SeyBrews or straight gin and mostly talked local politics, until finally people drifted away, and it was only me and Steve and Rick and an American woman diver named Pat Scott, a Red Cross worker from Illinois who’d just spent four weeks in Kenya and Tanzania and was out now “for a few weeks of R and R,” she told me. I asked her what had brought her so far from Illinois. “It’s simple,” she said. “You got Bonaire, you got the Red Sea, and you got Seychelles. Those’re the three best diving spots in the world. I’ve been to Bonaire, and I can’t go to the Red Sea right now.”

  The following afternoon I finally caught an interisland boat to the tiny island of La Digue, some twenty-five miles away, a three-hour ride. It was a freighter with fifteen to twenty passengers, mostly school kids going home for a few days on holiday break, a few intrepid travelers, and a man I especially noticed, a tiny, very old man who I assumed was British. He spoke to no one, and his demeanor resisted conversation. He had a furled black umbrella and a crisp gray military mustache and around his wattled neck a pair of binoculars on a string. I pegged him as a lifelong, hopeful birder coming out to see, before he died, the paradise flycatcher on La Digue and the black parrot on Praslin, two of the world’s rarest birds, and even here seen only infrequently.

  The islands themselves, La Digue and Praslin, situated close to each other, are as unique as the rare birds that make them their last home. Several biblical legends have been associated with the islands, generated by the famous coco-de-mer, the towering palm that grows only on Praslin. It’s a tree whose huge seeds of astonishingly erotic shapes have washed up for eons on the shores of India, Africa, and Indonesia, coming from a place so far off the map that, until relatively recent times, no one knew it existed. Inevitably, the rare and mysterious nut came to be regarded as an aphrodisiac, and naturally, Victorian Christians, once they discovered its source, decided that the place was the original paradise and that the coco-de-mer was surely the Edenic fruit that had caused so much trouble there and everywhere.

  As our boat approached La Digue, the old man with the black umbrella tottered up and out of the cabin to the deck and began studying
the shore through his binoculars, not missing one of the not-too-many moments he had left. His combined ferocity of purpose and concentration and his physical fragility made him a striking sight, especially surrounded as he was by a gang of boisterous, healthy Seychellois school kids who seemed to have no focus whatsoever for their enormous vitality.

  The coco-de-mer aside, the island of La Digue, if not paradise, was not far east of Eden. There were very few people, fewer than two thousand, and almost no motor vehicles. No place was too far to walk to. Bicycles and oxcarts were used for transportation, though the oxcarts were mostly for hauling tourists from the jetty along the single-lane dirt road to the one hotel in town. Réunion, the town, was a tiny fishing settlement scattered along the coast, facing Praslin a few miles to the northwest.

  At La Digue Island Lodge, I was put in “the yellow house,” which turned out to be a renovated, bright yellow colonial residence with a shady veranda and eight small neat rooms, each with a spiral staircase leading to a large first-class bathroom below. There was an abundance of elaborately carved woodwork everywhere: banisters, doors, sashes, countertops—all of it beautifully crafted, fitted, and finished.

  It was the heat of the day, midafternoon, but I was so eager to see more of this place that I unpacked quickly and went out for a serious walk, forgetting my hat and neglecting to bring a bottle of water.

  Big mistake. I hiked north through the village, passing day-trippers from Mahé and Praslin pedaling rented bikes out to the beaches and now and then a scrawny dog who couldn’t find a piece of shade. North of town and then around the point, one incredibly beautiful cove led to another, with no one there—nothing but lush, equatorial foliage, flowers, white sand beach, pink and red granite boulders eroding into fantastic shapes. Soon I’d gone beyond the point of easy return to the village. But it was impossible not to keep walking. The astounding beauty like a drug led me way beyond the point of no return, until I was closer to circling the whole island than going back over my tracks. So I kept going, despite the heat and my thirst.

  At one point I caught up to a teenage girl walking barefoot in a red dress in the glaring heat and sunlight, over from Mahé, she told me, on holiday from school and on her way to visit her grandma. A Little Red Riding Hood who may have been a hallucination by this time, although she seemed real enough, and I certainly did speak with her as we walked side by side for several miles. I felt like the Wolf, disguised not as a proper woodsman but as a tanned hiker who, beneath his clever disguise, was all lupine gray and corrupted by the huge dark industrialized world beyond.

  Finally, we came to a path that led to where she said her grandma lived, and the girl parted from me. A ways farther, my trail ended, became a narrow track in the bush, then disappeared among the rocks before my eyes, and I feared that with one more step I would be lost. With no choice in the matter, I turned back, staggering along the pathway to the single-track roadway, the sun beating straight down on me. I slogged on, dizzy and rapidly nearing the point of exhaustion and dangerous dehydration, genuinely frightened now, when suddenly a beat-up red pickup truck rattled along, coming from God-knows-where behind me, with a bunch of teenage boys in back. Was it a hallucination, too? It was red, after all.

  But no, it was real—spewing exhaust and blatting and skipping along the rough seacoast road with the radio blasting and the boys in the back banging loudly on the roof of the cab in time to Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry.” Never so glad to see a motor vehicle in my life, I hailed the truck, the driver brought it to a stop, and I climbed aboard and rode back to Réunion, surely saved from serious sunstroke.

  Two hours later, showered in my first-class air-conditioned bathroom, two to three quarts of water in my belly, and a short nap behind me, I was fully recovered and ready for action. There wasn’t much action on La Digue, however. After dinner at the hotel restaurant, I walked in the dark down to Choppy’s, a bar located in an old movie theater called the Odéon, where I talked awhile with a local fisherman named Michael and his German girlfriend, Karen, who’d been out here for eleven months now. At Michael and Karen’s urging, and the bartender’s compliance, I tried baka, a fermented fruit brew with a very high alcohol content, a local favorite since colonial days. The bartender kept it in a jug in a cooler behind the bar and offered “samples only,” as she had no license to sell it. It wasn’t bad, but very dangerous, like a strong planter’s punch.

  Later, Michael and Karen took me to le disco at the cinder-block community center, where we all danced furiously to very loud, very good dance music, mostly U.S. rap and Jamaican reggae, in a nearly dark hall lit by a single yellow bulb.

  The next day was the day I sighted the paradise flycatcher out by the old French graveyard, and afterward, as if to recover my senses, I spent the afternoon reading Henry James alone at a beach. Coming back to Réunion, I noticed at the side of a small house a wire cage holding what appeared to be three house cats but on closer inspection turned out to be fox bats. They are regarded as a delicacy here and are eaten grilled, baked, or in a pâté. I stopped and examined them for a long while, fascinated to see them up close like this. Their bodies were indeed the size of a house cat, but when they spread their black, silky wings, they were as big as eagles. They had small canine faces with reddish hair covering their bodies, except for their wings. They hung upside down inside the cage, watching me alertly, keeping their faces toward me as I circled outside the cage, their claws clattering against the wires as they turned. They yawned now and then, like bored dogs, but their eyes were black and watchful, as if they knew what was in store for them.

  That evening, I was standing by the hotel pool having a loony conversation with a bald-headed Russian who looked like Yul Brynner and was teaching his five-year-old daughter to write Roman numerals in the sand. He kept uttering pronouncements like “Twentieth-century literature is the literature of suicide” and “Christianity is only the second of the five levels of understanding,” like a character out of Dostoyevsky. In exasperation, I rolled my eyes skyward and saw swooping over the tops of the trees, silhouetted against the rose-colored evening sky, four, five, six fox bats, stunningly graceful in flight. They were so much more exciting and beautiful than when caged, and powerful, frightening—flying like land animals with wings, not at all like birds. They flew exactly as we do in our dreams of flying—controlled floating, wheeling overhead, safely watching everything going on below.

  To catch the six o’clock ferry to Praslin the next morning, I was up at five and arrived at the jetty just as the boat was pulling away—even though it was only five thirty-five. I leaped aboard, just making it, to the delight and laughter of the crew and the handful of local people on board. They do have schedules here, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them, and they’re as often early as late. As we left the bay, the sun rose behind the black silhouette of La Digue, and the sky went from cream to pale rose to turquoise. The water turned glossy black, and the island was a purple carbon color. I watched in awe while the earth simply behaved as it must.

  Coming out here, I’d had only a vague idea of the effect the natural world could have on me. I had been thinking beaches, mountains, a few serious hikes in the rain forest, flowers, ferns, birds—the usual set of tropical-island clichés. I’d been a little curious about the people, about society, politics, history, racial attitudes. But I hadn’t been very curious about the place itself, the land and the sea and the sky above and what lived in them and on them. But with all this hiking, with my visits to the untouched reef and the schools of protected fish, the shifting white mists of Trois Frères, the spotless, solitary beaches, putting myself in and on the land and sea, with the sighting of the paradise flycatcher my first full day on La Digue and fox bats soaring above the palms against the evening sky—these sights, almost like visions, had deeply affected the quality and intensity of my emotions, radically altering the overall relation I bore to this place in particular and to the environment in general.

  The na
tural world has been preserved here, yes, but seeing it this close makes you aware of your absolute need for it, and that can break your heart. The preservation of this tiny bit of the planet makes you realize that the rest of the planet has been destroyed and can’t be made to come back. For me, the big event was seeing the paradise flycatcher. That did it—broke my heart. I couldn’t get over the fact that there are only forty pairs left on the earth, all of them on the remote island of La Digue, and that one of the birds was twittering on a poinciana branch right in front of me.

  And now I was headed to Praslin, home of the Vallée de Mai, where the legendary coco-de-mer palm tree grew and where the last twenty-six black parrots on earth were to be found. How many by today? Twenty-three? Up to twenty-eight, maybe? Did it matter? Peter Matthiessen trekked to the high Himalayas to see one of the last snow leopards on earth. For me, I guess, it’s the last paradise flycatcher, the last black parrot. More modest, I suppose, than Matthiessen’s quest, but no less significantly moving to me for that. Standing eye-to-eye with that little black bird in an old French colonial cemetery amid crumbling, sinking stones at the edge of the shore—that’s adventure enough for my heart.

  About as much as I can handle, actually. But that’s what one needs, isn’t it? Enough heartache, not to save the world, for that’s simply no longer possible, but merely to keep from helping in its destruction. The elegiac mode is the only appropriate form for our attention now. The only one available to me, anyhow. Up to now, I’d not been wrong, just unimaginative, about the fate of the earth, and in that sense, which is an important one, I had been wrong. Those T-shirts worn by Seychellois teenagers with the motto BE AN EXAMPLE TO THE WORLD! don’t look so chauvinistic and provincial anymore. Just too late.