Silence of the Chagos

by Shenaz Patel

  He saw it, he foresaw its underhandedness, it would dissolve him from the inside out, insidiously, it would leach his ribs and his spine, liquefy his stomach and his viscera, all that would be left was its water, spilling from the wineskin that was his flesh.

  He barely had time to heave his torso out of the bunk. He vomited a long while, feverishly, onto the cabin floor, wondering where this smell of bergamot filling his throat and his head had come from.

  The sea hadn’t wanted him, and so he had ended up back on land. For weeks, he had been scanning the classifieds in the major papers every day. Rows of close-set letters that started moving like lines of black ants beneath his weary eyes. Nothing but jobs as factory engineers or other roles that required experience he didn’t have. He was going in circles.

  A friend told him about a big construction company that was looking for builders at various construction sites, and he didn’t hesitate. Two days later, Désiré was hired.

  The work uniform they had given him added a certain look to his frame. But as soon as he stepped onto the construction site, the enthusiasm he had tried to muster deflated like a soufflé.

  Grayness swiftly closed in around him. The already tall tower obscured the sky, iron rods were sticking out of all the cold concrete, and the cement dust coated the sparse grasses and the men’s hair. A few yellow hemispheres stood out: only the important-looking men who visited the site on occasion to point out things and bark out orders wore safety helmets.

  Désiré had jolted when a tremor had begun, not beneath his feet, but up in the air. A metallic rumble, punctuated by occasional sounds of scraping that reminded him of the noise a lawn mower made when hitting a pebble. The cement mixers had started working. Their revolutions would set the whole day’s rhythm, with only half an hour’s rest during the lunch break.

  The cement dust clung to his body, its acidity ate away at his skin. The grayness choked his muscles and his willpower.

  Désiré sat at the table for dinner with no appetite at all. A shooting pain ran through his shoulder. He would have to go back tomorrow, and the next day, and beyond. He would have to force his crippled body to get up each morning, to pull on his uniform stiffened by a nearly invisible coating of cement dust to the point of standing upright on its own, piling up bricks, feeling their rough surface beneath his hands, the concrete mixers tirelessly spitting their thick, gray sludge, the men talking loudly when the machines had stopped, yelling at each other from opposite ends of the site, shouting jokes at the top of their voices that he could only hear parts of as they burst into riotous laughter.

  He wasn’t made for this wordless drudgery of laying concrete. But what else are you going to do? another voice had asked him. Run away? Go to sea? You already tried that and came back, didn’t you? The sea didn’t want you, it spat you back out like a bit of kelp. Yes, he remembered perfectly. His washing up like a shipwreck. His refusal to go back to sea. Never again. He had barely come out alive. He wasn’t going to risk it a second time. There were plenty of men born on land who never felt at home on the high seas, after all. So he would go back to the construction site. The next day, and all the days after that.

  On the third day of work, the foreman told him that the company paid their salaries directly into their employees’ bank accounts. He needed one. A bank account. The prospect delighted him. He would have money, more than his pockets could hold. The following day, he went to the center of Port Louis.

  The revolving doors had given him pause, until he was able to follow right behind a man in a tie walking briskly. The long row of bank counters under fluorescent light wasn’t reassuring. He watched account holders moving from one counter to the next, asked a uniformed employee where to go. He was directed toward a young woman who he understood was in charge of opening new accounts.

  She barely glanced at him. Her attention was on the form she had taken out of a drawer and was filling out in triplicate, white, blue, and yellow. First name. Last name. Date of birth. ID card.

  Désiré fell silent.

  “ID card, please.” Her voice became more insistent, with a hint of impatience.

  He walked out of the bank a few minutes later, distraught. He didn’t have an ID card.

  The next day, the news landed like a hammer blow from the Social Security office. He couldn’t obtain a national ID card. He wasn’t Mauritian.

  “See, it’s written on your birth certificate: born on the Vordvaer off the coast of the Seychelles.”

  “Not Vordvaer. Nordvaer.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a mistake on the paper, they wrote wrong. It should say born on the Nordvaer, not the Vordvaer.”

  “All right. Fine. As you wish. In any case we can’t give you an ID card.”

  That was that. The Social Security officer seemed not to be surprised at all.

  Désiré, however, hadn’t seen the last of his troubles. His birth certificate was riddled with errors. “Georges Désiré Désir” was written on it. Désir being the last name, even though his entire family was called Désiré. What had the registrar in the Seychelles been thinking?

  He had to go see lawyers, swear affidavits, and undertake a long succession of complicated, costly procedures. It was only after the Prime Minister’s office interceded that he finally received a provisional ID card. But his two days’ salary were gone. He hadn’t gone back to the construction site.

  Désiré didn’t know where he belonged anymore. Mauritius? He had always lived here but he had no nationality. The Seychelles? He had never seen that land. Britain? They were even less willing to take him on there. The Chagos? He had never been to those islands where he should have come into the world. His place of birth was a boat that had disappeared.

  Désiré was almost disappointed. He had imagined something sizable, a foreboding silhouette, a bit like that of a slave ship, a dark, imposing mass that contained a world of anguish, pain, agony. More than a century after slavery had been officially abolished, the Chagossians had still been treated as such, crammed into holds, unloaded on a quay, cast aside without any further thought in hopes that they might simply disperse into a brownish dust that the lightest sea breeze would carry away.

  The Nordvaer bore no resemblance to all the hideous or sinister depictions he had envisioned. The photo showed a boat that was completely white, absolutely unremarkable. Down to its size, so modest that he had trouble believing it had indeed transported so many souls. There must have been a mistake.

  Then Désiré had the idea to write to the National Library of Norway, an idea that ultimately paid off. After several letters had been exchanged with staff members up to its director, he had a number of consistent pieces of information. And a letter.

  The envelope was all crumpled up, somewhat dented with a tear on one side. He ripped the brown paper hastily and pulled out a wad of printed sheets. A copy of an article on the Nordvaer written by T. G. Bodegaard, which had been published in a shipping newsletter.

  “Dinner is ready.”

  His mother’s voice. She was right behind the curtain separating his bedroom from the living room. Désiré slid the envelope under his pillow and stepped out. In the kitchen, on the plastic tablecloth with geometric patterns, she had set down plates of steaming rice. They ate in silence as they listened to music on the radio. Désiré could tell that his mother was waiting for him to talk. But he was too eager to read the article; he picked at his plate, got up, and went outside to give his leftovers to the dog.

  The chain was broken. It was dangling all alone by the low wall bordering the neighbors’ yard. The dog had found some way to escape. Désiré spent the whole night roaming the neighborhood in hopes of finding his pet again. Around midnight, he found the dog at last, fidgeting beside a door. It could smell a bitch on the other side. Bringing the animal back was no easy feat.

  It was nearly one in the morning when Désiré finally lay down on his bed with the precious envelope in his hand. He was exhausted enough that it t
ook serious effort to focus on the letters blurring in front of his eyes.

  He carried these screams within his frame. They reverberated in his carcass, their dulled waves scaring off the birds that happened to perch on him. He tried in vain to withdraw into the sand he was already sinking into, but these strange vibrations that sundered waters began again. All it took was a bird’s shriek for silence to be shattered within his old body.

  Reawakened, abruptly. They were there. All of them. Tens and hundreds of them clinging to him, pushing him away, trying to flee him, but forced to lean against his walls in hopes of breathing, of escaping the pressure of other bodies, so many other teetering, colliding bodies.

  He never could have believed this. That he could carry so many bodies and not burst. But he had had the time to test his limits over innumerable voyages. Built in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, he had made his first trips for a navigation company on the coast of Bodø. In Norway.

  1958. A year of note. Each week he traveled between Trondheim and the Lofoten Islands. An agreeable job: ferrying passengers, usually refined British visitors, no more than a dozen, one way. And carrying a load of freshly caught fish and seafood the other way. He took such pride in connecting these islands with the stark, arrogant mountains. Ah, this haughty nature, this cold yet living sea. It had been nothing like here. Nobody had cared about the shock he had sustained in becoming unmoored from his homeland, about the suffocation he had endured the first time he had entered these warm, salty, heavy waters of the South.

  Years went by coming and going without the least hiccup, without a single delay. Then things changed. First was the train: the arrival of trains had made him useless. This heavy, noisy, dirty railroad had replaced him summarily.

  Humanity’s ingratitude had sold him to the other end of the world. To the Seychellois government. His first voyage had been a nightmare. He had thought he would fall apart in crossing the equator. But he was possessed of a solid constitution. He had become habituated, and even learned to take pleasure in being there. To be sure, this was another existence; he sailed around the Indian Ocean, between Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Chagos, transporting provisions and coconut-palm derivatives including oil, brooms, and brushes, as well as the occasional passenger. He had become valuable again, keenly anticipated, and he came to appreciate the temperament of these warmer, happier people he cared for.

  At the end of the sixties, he had been emblematized on a stamp that was printed in honor of the anniversary of the British Indian Ocean Territories. This famous BIOT that grouped together the British colonies of the Indian Ocean. With the profile of the Queen of England watching over him from above on the right side of the small square of paper. He and the Queen, together in the same frame. This felt worth the pain of having left his Norwegian waters.

  He had to undergo some repairs thereafter. No doubt they had grander ambitions for him, because the addition of an upper deck had, in a single move, dramatically increased his capacity. His profile had changed, of course, but he was eager to discover the even more glorious future that had been envisioned for him.

  He had begun to pick up odd rumors on board. The details became much clearer one night in the middle of one of his crossings. He had heard them talking. Forcibly removing these people he had grown accustomed to? He refused to help in any way with this expulsion. A cyclone, a storm, a murky groundswell would come and capsize him and free him of these conspirators, eject them, drown them, them and their evil plans too.

  But he was powerless.

  They had loaded him to the brim with poorly tied bags, men, women, children, piled up every which way. He would have liked to swell up, make himself bigger, give them a little more space, but he had no way to, he had no idea how to.

  During the entire crossing he remembered, almost ritualistically, the words of Norway’s national anthem. Ja, vi elsker dette landet. Yes, we love, with fond devotion, this our land. If there were an image of death, it might have been these distant, flowing memories. It might have been the warnings that he would sink, dragged downward by the weight of all these people, the weight of the despair crushing them in his hold.

  He remembered a dog that had chased after him, barking behind him, and a child that he had carried on his deck, the child holding out its hand, both its hands, holding out its cries and its entire body to the dog. The dog had run on three legs, nearly dislocating its ribs, running on three legs with a wild energy, this need that did not relent, did not waver. This dog that pursued him, the ship carrying away this child like a thief.

  The dog had run alongside his wake and followed him so long as there was sand beneath its paws. Suddenly the dog had stopped, brought up short by the sea. And had watched him leaving, standing on its three paws, a dramatic, ludicrous silhouette, a final sentry that no longer had anything to guard. Nor anything to hope for.

  He did not know how long the dog had stayed there after he had fallen out of sight, a dot that could just as easily have been a bird perched on a fading memory of land. Whether it had gone to sleep there, at that spot, or if it had turned back, its head lowered. If it had survived, for how long. How. With three legs and no eyes. These eyes he had carried, could still feel, embedded in his hull, on his starboard side. Everywhere, he had carried them everywhere, across the seas, as far as he could flee, he had even dreamed of drowning them, of drowning himself, but to no avail. And all this water that washed him every day without protecting him. These eyes burned him, two blowtorches that bore through his sides, that drilled through his shell to reach his core.

  He had heard them talking, in the captain’s cabin, about how they had killed them all before he had arrived. All the dogs. They had rounded them all up. Some had tried to escape. They hadn’t made it far. Beaten into submission with baton blows. Shoved into the convectors. They had shut the door. Filled the oven’s maw with dry straw. Started the fire.

  He knew he had seen this dog, a survivor no doubt. Those eyes of its remained, howling even more loudly than a dog that could smell death coming, with far more insistence, more despair. And these howls mixed with the screams, silent screams shut away in human throats, screams that never rang out because they couldn’t make it past clenched jaws or pressed lips.

  But he had heard them. Hoarse, raw, bristling with fear and incomprehension.

  He had never stopped hearing them, no storm had ever silenced them.

  They resounded within him, the silent screams that these men and women had stifled deep within their throats, so strong that they had seeped out through their eyes in long, salty rivulets.

  It was on that day that he began to rust from the inside.

  If only he had been allowed to sink. They had made so many reefs out of boats too old to be of any use anymore. Maybe under the water he could have had some chance of crushing these screams beneath the weight of heavy sleep. They settled on beaching him, like an unremarkable bit of wood, and shrill, jeering birds taunted him relentlessly, screeching and fighting to perch on his hull, covering him with their yellowish droppings before flitting off again.

  He couldn’t help thinking of the Catalina every so often, a twin-engine plane just as broken as he was. Back there, on the beach of Diego Garcia. Its nose pointed skyward, its carcass strangely slumped in the sand. At least it had served as a playground for the children.

  The children. All these years later, he still retained the traces of their terrified tears. And there had been this scream, unlike any of the others. He had never heard such a sound before. He would go on hearing it until he died. This scream of a baby being brought into this world. This sound had made the ship tremble from stem to stern. He would have liked to blare his siren, to spread the joy of this moment. A baby. A baby was born within me. In my belly. I helped a baby come into this world, I sheltered a baby, I cradled a baby. But they took the baby away, the baby and all the others.

  île nous reste les cartes les traces

  vies voilées par l’histoire violée

 
; île nous reste à crier à écrire

  la haine imbécile

  et l’histoire qui s’enchaîne

  Diego ton nom sur la carte rayé

  Diego amour

  Diego amer

  Diego à mort…

  I’ll land this, our pain: maps and traces

  lives halted by a history assaulted

  I’ll lend this, our pen, to write, to right

  their futile hatred

  and the ties and tides of history

  your name, scratched from the map, Diego

  loving Diego

  loathing Diego

  nothing Diego…

  Michel Ducasse, Mélangés

  translated by Lisa Ducasse

  Désiré woke up with a start. The whole night, this boat had been talking in his head. He was obsessed. There was so much he wanted to know, to understand. But he could tell that he wouldn’t be able to ask his mother all these questions overwhelming him.

  He left the house quietly so as not to wake her up. Outside, the night was slowly dissipating. He walked aimlessly. A few dogs were rummaging through overturned trash cans. The streetlights were falling asleep one by one. It was only when he saw the makeshift fence of barriers around the harbor that he realized his feet had led him there, once again, irresistibly.

  He made his way up the deserted promenade, which would soon welcome the horde of tourists, office employees, and other people who found themselves in Port Louis each day. Sitting on a bench, he contemplated the smooth sea stretching out beyond the wrought railing. A few greasy pieces of paper and plastic bottles had collected in an oil slick that was slowly moving across the water.