The Prospector

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  This is where he’d chosen to set up the power plant that will provide electricity to the entire western region, from Médine all the way to Bel Ombre. The generator he’d bought in London by correspondence has just been unloaded in Port Louis and it has come all the way in an ox cart down the coast to Black River. From now on the days of oil-lamp lighting and the steam engine are over and, thanks to our father, electricity will gradually bring progress to our island. Mam also explains electricity to us, its properties, its uses. But we are too young to understand any of that, except for experimenting, as we used to do every day back then, with the mysteries of the bits of paper magnetized by Mam’s amber necklace.

  One day, we all – Mam, my father, Laure and I – leave in the carriage to go out to the Bassin aux Aigrettes. It’s very early, Mam wants to be back before noon because of the heat. At the second curve in the road to Black River we take the path that leads up along the river. My father has had the path cleared so that the ox cart carrying the generator could get through, and our carriage rolls along in a huge cloud of dust.

  It’s the first time that Laure and I have been up Black River and we’re peering curiously at the surroundings. The dust from the path rises up around us, enveloping the cart in an ochre cloud. Mam has a shawl about her face, she looks like an Indian woman. My father is cheerful, he’s talking as he steers the horse. I can still picture him, just as I’ll never be able to forget him: very tall and thin, elegant, wearing his grey-black suit, black hair swept back. I can see his profile, his fine, aquiline nose, his neatly kempt beard, his elegant hands, which are always holding a cigarette between the thumb and forefinger, the way one holds a pencil. Mam is looking at him too, I can see the light in her eyes that morning, on the dusty road that runs along Black River.

  When we near the Bassin aux Aigrettes my father ties the horse to the branch of a tamarind tree. The water in the pool is clear, sky-blue. The wind is making ripples that stir the reeds. Laure and I say we’d like to go swimming, but my father is already walking over to the structure that houses the generator. Inside a wooden shed he shows us the dynamo connected with wires and belts to the turbine. In the dim light there is an eerie gleam to the gearing that somewhat frightens us. Our father also shows us the water from the pool flowing down from a conduit back into Black River. Large spools of cable lie on the ground in front of the generator. My father explains that the cables will be strung up along the entire length of the river, all the way to the sugar mill. Then from there, up over the hills to Tamarin and the Boucan Embayment. Later, when the installation has been tried and tested, the electricity will go even farther north, up to Médine, to Wolmar, maybe as far as Phoenix. My father is saying all of this to us, to my mother, but his face is turned away, towards another era, another world.

  So we’re always thinking about electricity. Every evening Laure and I believe it’s going to come, as if all of a sudden it will miraculously illuminate everything inside of our house, and will shine outside and light up the plants and the trees like Saint Elmo’s Fire. ‘When will it come?’ Mam smiles when we ask her that question. We’d like to hasten the mysterious event. ‘Soon…’ She explains that the turbine needs to be installed, the dam consolidated, the wooden poles set in the ground and the cables attached to them. It will take months, maybe years. No, it’s just impossible that we should have to wait so long. My father is even more impatient, electricity also means the end of his problems, the beginning of a new chance. Uncle Ludovic will see. He’ll understand – he who never wanted to believe in the project – when electric turbines replace the steam engines in all of the sugar mills in the west. My father goes to Port Louis, to Rempart Street almost every day. He sees important people, bankers, businessmen. Uncle Ludovic doesn’t come to Boucan any more. They say he doesn’t believe in electricity, at least not in this type of electricity. Laure heard our father say that one evening. But if Uncle Ludovic doesn’t believe in it, how will it get out this far? Because he owns all of the land in the surrounding area, he owns all of the streams. Even Boucan Embayment belongs to him. Laure and I spend that last summer, the long month of January, lying on the floor in the attic, reading. We stop whenever there is mention of an electric machine, a dynamo or even just a filament lamp.

  Nights are oppressive, now there is a sort of expectancy between the damp sheets under the mosquito netting. Something is supposed to happen. In the darkness I wait for the sound of the sea, watch the full moon rise through the shutters. How do we know what is supposed to happen? Maybe it’s in Mam’s eyes every evening at lesson time. She tries not to let anything show, but her voice isn’t the same, her words have changed. We can sense that she’s anxious, impatient inside. At times she stops in the middle of a dictation and looks over in the direction of the tall trees as if she expected something to appear.

  One day in the late afternoon, as I’m returning from distant expeditions with Denis in the woods over by the gorges, I see my father and Mam on the veranda. Laure is with them, standing a little off to one side. I feel a pain in my chest, because I know right away that something bad has happened while I was in the forest. I’m also afraid of being reprimanded by my father. He’s standing near the stairs, looking gloomy, very thin in his baggy black suit. As always, he’s holding his cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  ‘Where were you?’

  He asks me that question as I’m coming up the stairs, and I stop. He doesn’t expect an answer. He simply says, in a voice I’ve never heard him use, an odd, somewhat gruff voice, ‘Very grave events are likely to occur…’

  He doesn’t know how to go on.

  Mam begins talking in his place. She’s pale, looks distraught. That’s what hurts most. I would be so grateful not to hear what she has to say.

  ‘Alexis, we’ll have to leave this house. We’ll have to go away from here, for ever.’

  Laure doesn’t say anything. She’s standing up very straight on the veranda, she’s staring out straight ahead. She has the same impassive, hard look as she did when Uncle Ludovic was asking her name in that ironic voice of his.

  It’s already twilight. Night is beginning to fall gently over the garden. Before our eyes, up over the treetops, the first star suddenly twinkles with a magical gleam. Laure and I look at it, and Mam also turns towards the sky, she stares at the star hanging over Black River as if it were the first time she’d ever seen it.

  We stand still under the gaze of that star for a long time. Shadows settle under the trees, we hear the cracking, the swishing of night, the high-pitched song of mosquitoes.

  Mam is the first to break the silence.

  ‘How lovely!’ she says with a sigh.

  Then, cheerfully, walking down the steps of the veranda, ‘Come along, let’s try to find the names of the stars.’

  My father has come down too. He’s walking along slowly, slightly stooped, hands behind his back. I’m walking beside him, and Laure has put her arm around Mam. Together we make our way around the large house, as if it were a beached ship. In Capt’n Cook’s hut there is a wavering light, we can hear muffled voices. He and his wife will be the last to leave the property. Where will they go? When he first came to Boucan, in the days of my grandfather, he must have been not more than twenty years old. He’d just been emancipated. I can hear his voice in the hut, he’s talking to himself, or singing. In the distance, other voices echo out in the cane fields, it’s the gunnies who are out gleaning or walking down the La Coupe track towards Tamarin. There’s also the chirping of insects and the song of toads in the ravine at the other end of the garden.

  Just for us, the sky lights up. We must forget everything else and think only of the stars. Mam shows us the lights, she calls my father over to ask us questions. I can hear her clear young voice in the darkness and it soothes, reassures me.

  ‘Look, there… Isn’t that Betelgeuse, up at the very top of Orion? And the Three Kings! Look north, you’ll see the Big Dipper. What’s the name of
the little star at the very end of the Dipper, on the handle?’

  I stare as hard as I can. I’m not sure I can see it.

  ‘A tiny little star set right at the top of the Dipper, just above the second star?’ My father asks that question very gravely, as if on this evening it is particularly important.

  ‘Yes, that one. It’s very small, I see it and then it disappears.’

  ‘That’s Alcor,’ my father says. ‘It’s also called the Rider. The Arabs named it Alcor, which means “test”, because it is so small only the sharpest eyes can make it out.’ He falls silent for a moment, then says to Mam in a gayer tone of voice, ‘You’ve got good eyesight, I can’t see it any more.’

  I too can see Alcor, or rather I imagine I can, as tiny as a small speck of cinder glowing above the handle of the Big Dipper. And having seen it makes all the bad memories, all the anxiety, vanish.

  My father taught us to love the night. Sometimes in the evenings, when he isn’t working in his office, he takes us by the hand, Laure on his right and me on his left, and walks us down the alleyway stretching south all the way down to the bottom of the garden. He calls it the ‘alley of stars’, because it leads out towards the most crowded region of the sky. As he walks he smokes a cigarette and we smell the sweet odour of tobacco in the night and see the tip glowing red near his lips and lighting up his face. I love the smell of tobacco in the night.

  The most beautiful nights are in July, when the sky is glittering and cold and, up above the mountains of Black River, we can see all the most beautiful lights in the sky: Vega, Altair in the Eagle – Laure says that it looks more like a lantern on a kite – and the third one whose name I can never remember, like a jewel atop the great cross. They are the three stars my father calls the Belles de nuit, that shine in a triangle in the pure sky. There are also Jupiter and Saturn, far to the south, which are stationary lights hanging over the mountains. Laure and I often observe Saturn because Aunt Adelaide told us it was our planet, the dominant planet in the sky when we were born, in December. It’s lovely, slightly bluish, and it shines out above the trees. But it’s true, there’s something frightening about it, a pure, steely light like the one that sometimes shines in Laure’s eyes. Mars isn’t far from Saturn. It’s bright red and its light also attracts our attention. My father doesn’t like what people say about the planets.

  ‘Come with me, let’s go have a look at the Southern Cross,’ he says.

  He walks out in front of us all the way to the end of the alley, over by the chalta tree. In order to be able to see the Southern Cross you need to be far from the lights of the house. We look up at the sky, almost without breathing. I immediately pinpoint ‘The Followers’ high up in the sky at the tail end of Centaurus. To the right, the Cross hovers palely, slightly tilted, like the sail of a pirogue. Laure and I spot it at the same time, but we don’t need to say anything. We gaze up at the Cross without speaking. Mam comes out to join us and she doesn’t say a word to our father. We just stand there and it seems as if we’re listening to the sound of the planets in the night. It’s so beautiful, there’s no need to say anything. But I can feel that pain in my chest and throat growing tighter, because something has changed on this night, something says that it must all come to an end. Maybe it’s written in the stars – that’s what I think – maybe what needs to be done to keep things from changing and save us is also written in the stars.

  There are so many signs in the sky. I remember all of those summer nights when we would lie in the grass in the garden trying to glimpse falling stars. One night we’d seen stars come raining down and Mam had blurted out, ‘It’s a sign of war.’ But she’d said nothing more, because our father doesn’t like us to say those kinds of things. We lay there for a long time, watching the incandescent trails streaking across the sky in all directions, some so long we could follow them with our eyes, others very brief, exploding immediately. We would look up at the sky so intently that it made our heads reel, made us teeter dizzily. I could hear Mam speaking softly with my father, but I didn’t understand the meaning of their words. Even today, on summer nights, I’m sure that Laure still tries – as I do – to see those streaks of fire that plot people’s destinies and make it possible for secrets to come true.

  Back then my father teaches us all about the night sky. Beginning in the east and stretching all the way northward, the great pale river of the Galaxy forms islands around the Cross of the Swan and then flows on towards Orion. Slightly above that, in the direction of our house, I can make out the dim glow of the Pleiades, like so many lightning bugs. I know every part of the sky, every constellation. Almost every evening our father shows us the positions of the stars on a large map tacked to the wall in his office. ‘A man who knows the stars well has nothing to fear from the sea,’ he says. Whenever there’s any mention of the stars, my father, who’s normally so reserved, so quiet, will grow lively, chattering on, bright-eyed. That’s when he says wonderful things about the world, about the sea, about God. He talks about the travels of the great mariners, those who discovered the route to India, discovered Oceania, America. Surrounded by the odour of tobacco hovering in his office, I’m listening, looking at the maps. He speaks of Cook, of Drake, of Magellan, who discovered the South Seas on the Victoria and who later died in the Sunda Islands. He speaks of Tasman, of Biscoe, of Wilkes – who travelled all the way to the eternal ice and snow of the South Pole – and also of the extraordinary travels of Marco Polo in China, De Soto in America, Orellana, who sailed up the Amazon River, Gmelin, who went out to the far end of Siberia, Mungo Park, Stanley, Livingstone, Przhevalsky. I listen to those stories, the names of those countries, Africa, Tibet, the South Sea Islands. They are magical names, to me they are like the names of the stars, like the drawings of the constellations. At night, lying on my cot, I listen to the sound of the sea rolling in, the wind in the needles of the she-oaks. And I think of all those names, it seems as if the night sky opens out and I am on a ship with billowing sails on the infinite sea, sailing out as far as the Moluccas, as far as Astrolabe Bay, Fiji, Moorea. On the deck of that ship, before falling asleep, I see the sky as I have never seen it before, so vast, dark blue over the phosphorescent sea. I slip slowly over to the other side of the horizon and glide out towards the Three Kings, towards the Southern Cross.

  I remember the first time I went to sea. I think it was in January, because at that time of year the heat is already torrid long before dawn and there isn’t a breath of wind in Boucan Embayment. At the first light of dawn I creep out of the room without making a sound. Outside all is silent still and everyone in the house is sleeping. A lone glimmer comes from inside Capt’n Cook’s shack, but at this early hour he’s paying no heed to anyone. He’s looking at the grey sky and waiting for daybreak. Maybe the rice is already boiling in the big black pot over the fire. To avoid making noise I walk barefoot over the dry earth in the alley, all the way out to the end of the garden. Denis is waiting for me under the tall chalta tree and when I get there he stands up and starts walking in the direction of the sea without saying a word. He walks quickly across the cane fields without worrying about my having trouble catching my breath. Turtle doves scuttle about between the cane stalks, alarmed, but not daring to take flight. It’s daylight when we reach the road to Black River. The earth is already hot under my feet and the air smells of dust. The first ox carts are already trundling along the paths in the fields and I can see the white smoke of the sugar-mill chimneys in the distance. I’m waiting for the sound of the wind to reach my ears. Suddenly Denis stops. We stand still in the middle of the cane field. Then I hear the murmur of the waves on the reefs. ‘Rough sea,’ says Denis. The tide wind is blowing towards us.

  We reach Black River just as the sun is coming up from behind the mountains. I’ve never been so far away from Boucan and my heart is pounding as I run behind Denis’s dark silhouette. We ford the river near its mouth and the cold water rises all the way up to our waists, then we walk along the black sand d
unes. On the beach the fishermen’s pirogues lie lined up on the sand, a few with their stems already in the water. The men push the pirogues into the waves, holding on to the rope of the sail that the wind is filling, making it snap. Denis’s pirogue is at the end of the beach, two men are pushing it towards the sea, an old man with a wrinkled, copper-coloured face and a tall, athletic black man. There is a very beautiful young woman with them, standing on the beach, hair tied up in a red scarf. ‘She mi sista,’ says Denis proudly. ‘And ’im har fiancé. Is ’im pirogue.’ The young woman catches sight of Denis, calls him over. Together we push the pirogue into the water. When the wave lifts the back of the pirogue, Denis shouts, ‘Get inna!’ And he jumps in too. He runs up to the front, grabs the pole to guide the pirogue out to the open sea. With the pirogue sailing close-hauled, the wind fills the large sheet-like sail and the boat goes leaping through the waves. We’re already a long way from shore. I’m drenched from the breakers and shivering, but I watch the dark coastline growing distant. I’ve been waiting so long for this day! Denis once talked to me about the sea and about this pirogue and I asked him, ‘When will you take me out with you on the pirogue?’ He looked at me without saying anything, as if he were thinking it over. I didn’t tell anyone about this, not even Laure, because I was afraid she’d repeat it to my father. Laure doesn’t like the sea, maybe she’s afraid I’ll drown. So when I went out barefoot this morning, to keep from making noise, she turned over in her bed, to face the wall, so she wouldn’t see me.

  What’s going to happen when I go back? But I don’t feel like thinking about that now, it’s sort of like I might never go back. The pirogue plunges into the hollows of the waves, making bursts of spume shower into the light. The old man and the fiancé have secured the triangular sail to the boom and the heavy wind coming from the pass is causing the pirogue to heel. Denis and I are squatting in the front of the pirogue, against the quivering canvas, soaked with sea spray. Denis’s eyes shine when he looks at me. Without saying a word he motions towards the dark-blue, open sea or else back behind us – already very far away – to the black line of the beach and the shapes of the mountains against the pale sky.