The Prospector
Page 5
The pirogue is skimming over the open sea. I can hear the deep rumble of the waves, the wind fills my ears. I’m no longer cold or afraid. The sun burns down, makes the crests of the waves sparkle. I can see nothing else, think of nothing else: the deep blue sea, the bobbing horizon, the taste of the sea, the wind. This is the first time I’ve been out on a boat and I’ve never experienced anything more wonderful. The pirogue sails through the pass, runs alongside the reefs amid the thundering waves and the heaving bursts of spray.
Denis is leaning over the stem, looking at the dark water as if searching for something. Then he extends his hand, indicating a huge, blackened rock straight ahead.
‘The Morne,’ he says.
I’ve never seen it up this close before. The Morne rises from the sea just like a lava stone, with not a tree, not a single plant. Around it are stretches of pale sand, the waters of the lagoons. It’s as if we are headed out to the end of the Earth. The seabirds are flying all around us, screeching, seagulls, sterns, white petrels, enormous frigates. My heart is pounding and I’m trembling anxiously, because I feel as if I’ve gone very far away, across the sea. The slow waves slap at the side of the pirogue and water floods into it. Denis ducks under the sail, picks up two gourds from the bottom of the pirogue and calls to me. We bail out the boat together. In the back, the tall black man – one arm enlacing Denis’s sister – is holding down the sail rope, while the old man with the face of an Indian is working the tiller. They are soaked with seawater, but laugh when they see us bailing the water that keeps flooding back in again. Squatting down in the back of the boat, I’m throwing the water over the leeward side and from time to time I catch a glimpse of the huge black wall of the Morne and the whitecaps out on the breakers.
Then we change course and the wind sweeps the large sail over our heads. Denis points to the coastline.
‘Over there, the pass. L’île aux Bénitiers, Clam Island.’
We stop bailing and crawl up to the front to get a better view. The white line of the breakers is fanning out before us. Borne along on the swell, the pirogue is heading straight for the Morne. The roaring of the waves on the coral reef is very near. The waves roll in diagonally, then break. Denis and I stare at the deep water, so very blue it is dizzying. Little by little the colour in front of the stem grows lighter. Green reflections, golden clouds can be seen. The bottom becomes visible, rushing past at top speed, patches of coral, the purplish balls of sea urchins, schools of silvery fish. The water is calm now and the wind has ceased. The sail hangs loose, flapping around the mast like a sheet. We are in the lagoon around the Morne, the place where the men come to fish.
The sun is high. The pirogue is sliding silently over the peaceful waters, punted along with Denis’s pole. In the back the fiancé is helping – not letting go of Denis’s sister – using a small paddle with one hand. The old man is inspecting the water with his back to the sun, looking for fish in holes in the coral. He’s holding a long, weighted line that he sends whistling through the air. After the fury of the dark open sea, after the gusting winds and the bursts of sea spray, in this place it’s as if I’m in a warm, light-filled dream. I feel the burn of the sun on my face, on my back. Denis has taken his clothes off to let them dry and I do the same. When he’s naked, he suddenly dives into the transparent water, almost without making a sound. I can see him swimming underwater, then he disappears. When he comes back to the surface, he’s holding a large red fish that he’s speared and he throws it into the bottom of the pirogue. He dives again immediately. His body goes gliding down into the depths, reappears, dives again. Finally he brings back another fish with bluish scales that he also throws into the pirogue. The pirogue is very near the coral reef now. The tall black man and the old man with the Indian face throw out their lines. They haul in fish several times, groupers, emperors, spinefoot.
We fish for a long time as the pirogue drifts along the reefs. The sun is burning up in the centre of the dark sky, but the light is springing from the sea, a blinding, inebriating light. As I lean over the stem, motionless, staring into the shimmering water, Denis touches me on the shoulder and brings me out of my torpor. His eyes gleam like black stones, he breaks into an odd Creole chant, ‘Lizié mani mani. Eyes all adazzle.’
It’s a dizziness that stems from the sea, like a kind of spell cast by the sun and the reflections that is befuddling me and draining my energy. In spite of the torrid heat I feel cold. Denis’s sister and her fiancé help me stretch out in the bottom of the pirogue, in the shade of the sail that is flapping in the breeze. Denis cups seawater in his hands and wets my face and body. Then, punting with his pole, he steers the pirogue over to the shore. A little later we run up on the white beach, near the point of the Morne. There, a few small trees grow – velvet leaf soldierbushes. With Denis’s aid I walk to the shade of one of them. Denis’s sister encourages me to drink a sour substance from a gourd; it burns my tongue and throat and wakes me up. I already want to stand, walk back to the pirogue, but Denis’s sister tells me I must stay in the shade until the sun has begun to go down towards the horizon. The old man has remained in the pirogue, leaning on the pole. Now they’re moving away on the shimmering water to fish some more.
Denis has remained sitting next to me. He doesn’t say anything. He’s just here with me in the shade of the small tree, legs covered with patches of white sand. He’s not like those other children who live in grand estates. He doesn’t need to talk. He’s my friend and his silence here beside me is a way of saying so.
Everything is lovely and peaceful in this place. I look at the green expanse of the lagoon, the ruff of foam along the barrier reef and the white sand of the beaches, the dunes, the sand dotted with spiny shrubs, the dark she-oak woods, the shade of the soldierbushes, the umbrella trees, and before us, the charred rock of the Morne, like a castle inhabited by seabirds. It’s as if we’ve been castaways here for months, far from any dwelling, waiting for a vessel to appear on the horizon to retrieve us. I think of Laure, who must be on the lookout up in the chalta tree, I think of Mam and my father, and I wish this moment would never end.
But the sun descends towards the sea, turns it to metal, to opaque glass. The fishermen come back. Denis is the one who sees them first. He walks across the white sand, his gangly figure looks like the shadow of his shadow. He swims out to meet the pirogue, in the sparkling water. I go into the sea after him. The cool water washes away my fatigue and I swim over to the pirogue in Denis’s wake. The fiancé holds out his hand and pulls us out effortlessly. The bottom of the pirogue is filled with all kinds of fish. There is even a small blue shark that the fiancé killed, jabbing it with a harpoon when it came up to eat one of the catch. Pierced through the middle of its body, the shark is stiff, mouth open, showing its triangular teeth. Denis says that the Chinese eat shark and that we’ll also make a necklace with the teeth.
Despite the hot sun, I’m shivering. I’ve taken off my clothes and laid them out to dry near the stem. Now the pirogue is slipping out towards the pass, we can already feel the long rollers that are still coming in from the open sea crashing down upon the coral reef. All of a sudden the sea turns violet, hard. When we go through the pass near Clam Island the wind rises. The large sail next to me fills out tightly and hums, sea foam splashes up at the prow. Denis and I quickly fold our clothes and tuck them away near the mast. The seabirds are following the pirogue, because they’ve smelled the fish. At times they even try to snatch a fish and Denis shouts, waving his arms to scare them away. They’re black frigates with piercing eyes that glide along on the wind next to the pirogue, cackling. Behind us, the large scorched rock of the Morne is growing distant in the veiled twilight like a castle being engulfed in shadows. Down flush with the horizon, the long grey clouds are streaking the sun.
Never will I forget this long day, so long it seems like months, like years, the day I discovered the sea for the first time. I’d like it to never end, to last even longer yet. I’d like the pirogue to
keep skipping over the waves in the splashing sea foam, all the way out to the Indies, even out to Oceania, going from island to island, lit by the sun that would never set.
Night has fallen when we run up on the beach in Black River. Denis and I walk rapidly to Boucan, barefoot in the dust. My clothing and hair are stiff with salt, my face, my back are burning with the light of the sun. When I arrive in front of the house Denis walks away without saying anything. I walk down the lane, heart racing, and I see my father standing on the veranda. By the light of the storm lamp he seems taller and thinner in his black suit. His face is pale, drawn with worry and anger. When I’m in front of him he says nothing, but his eyes are hard and cold and my throat tenses, not because of the punishment that awaits me, but because I know I’ll never go back out to sea again, that this is the end of it. That night, in spite of the fatigue, the hunger and the thirst, lying motionless in my bed which is burning my back, indifferent to the mosquitoes, I listen to every movement of the air, every breath of wind, every lull that brings me closer to the sea.
Laure and I live the last days of that summer – the year of the cyclone – even more closed up in our own world, secluded in the Boucan Embayment where no one comes to see us any more. Maybe that’s why we have this strange feeling that there is some kind of impending threat or danger. Or maybe solitude has made us more sensitive to the signs portending Boucan’s downfall. Maybe it’s also the almost unbearable heat that weighs upon the shores, upon the Tamarin Valley, night and day. Even the wind from the sea cannot alleviate the heat bearing down upon the plantations, upon the red earth. Around the aloe fields of Walhalla in Tamarin the land is as hot as a furnace and the streams have dried up. In the evening I look at the smoke from the Kah Hin distillery mingling with the clouds of red dust. Laure tells me of the fire that God sent raining down on the accursed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and also of Vesuvius erupting in the year AD 79, when the city of Pompeii was drowned in a rain of molten ash. But here we search the heavens in vain and the sky over Rempart Mountain and the Trois Mamelles remains clear, barely flawed by a few inoffensive clouds. But deep down inside ourselves we can sometimes sense the danger.
Mam has been sick for weeks now and she’s stopped her lessons. As for our father, he’s sombre and weary, he stays shut up in his office reading or writing or smoking, gazing blankly out of the window. I think it’s around this same time that he really speaks to me about the Mysterious Corsair’s treasure and the documents he’s kept concerning it. I’ve already heard about it once, long ago, maybe from Mam, who doesn’t believe in it at all. But this is when he talks to me about it at length, as one would about an important secret. What does he say? I can’t remember for certain, because it’s all mixed up in my mind with everything I read and heard afterwards, but I recall how strange he looks that afternoon when he asks me into his office.
It’s a room we never go into, except in secret, not that it is categorically off-limits, but there’s something secretive about that office which intimidates, even frightens us a little. At the time, my father’s office is a long narrow room all the way at one end of the house, wedged between the living room and my parents’ bedroom, a silent room, facing north with a parquet and panelled walls of varnished wood and furnished simply with a large writing table that has no drawers, and one easy chair and a few metal trunks filled with papers. The table is up against the window so that when the shutters are open Laure and I can see – from our hiding place behind the bushes in the garden – the silhouette of our father reading or writing, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke. From his office he has a view of the Trois Mamelles and the mountains of the Black River Gorges and can watch the course of the clouds.
I remember going into his office then, almost holding my breath, looking at the books and journals piled up on the floor, the maps tacked to the walls. The map I prefer is the one with the constellations that he’s already shown me to teach me astronomy. Whenever we go into the office we read the names of the stars and their formations in the night sky in awe: Sagittarius, led by the star named Nunki, Lupus, Aquila, Orion. Boötes, with Alphecca in the east, Arcturus in the west. Scorpius with threatening lines, with Shaula at the end of its tail like a luminous stinger and the red Antares in its head. The Greater Bear and each of the stars along its curve, Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Dubhe, Merak, Auriga, whose main star – Menkalinan – rings oddly in my mind.
I remember the Greater Dog that has the lovely Sirius in its mouth – like a fang – and down below it a triangle in which Adhara pulses. I can still see one perfect drawing, the one I love most, that I look for, night after night, in the summer sky over in the direction of Le Morne: that of the vessel Argo, which I sometimes draw in the dust on the paths like this:
My father is standing up, he’s talking and I don’t understand what he’s saying very well. He’s not really talking to me, the child with the too-long hair, the sun-browned face, the torn clothing from running through the underbrush and the cane fields. He’s talking to himself, his eyes are bright, his voice a bit husky with excitement. He’s talking about the immense treasure he’s going to discover, for he knows at last where it’s hidden, he’s discovered the island upon which the Corsair stowed his hoard. He doesn’t say the Corsair’s name, but just – as I will later read in his documents – the Mysterious Corsair, and even today that name still seems to me to be more real and filled with more magic than any other. He’s talking to me for the first time about Rodrigues Island, a dependency of Mauritius, that takes several days to reach by boat. Tacked to the wall of his office is a map of the island covered with signs and landmarks that he’s copied in India ink and painted in watercolour. At the bottom of the map I recall reading these words: Rodrigues Island, and under that Admiralty Chart, Wharton 1876. I’m listening to my father without hearing him, as if from deep in a dream. The legend of the treasure, the research that’s been done over the last hundred years on Amber Island, in Flic-en-Flac, in the Seychelles. Maybe it’s the feeling of being overwhelmed or the anxiety that’s keeping me from understanding, because I can tell it’s the most important thing in the world, a secret that can at any moment mean our salvation or our downfall. Now there’s no more talk of electricity or any other project. The light of the Rodrigues treasure is dazzling me and dulling all others. My father talks for a long time that afternoon, pacing around the narrow room, picking up papers and looking at them, then laying them back down without even showing me, while I remain standing still near his table, looking furtively at the map of Rodrigues Island stuck on the wall next to the map of the night sky. Maybe that’s why, later, I will always feel as if everything that happened after that, the adventure, the quest, took place in ethereal lands, not down on the real earth, as if my journey aboard the Argo had already begun.
These are the last days of summer and they seem very long, filled with so many events at all times of the day or night: they’re more like months or years, deeply changing the world around us and leaving us aged. Heatwave days when the air is dense, heavy and liquid down in the Tamarin Valley and one feels a prisoner of the circus of mountains. Beyond, the sky is clear, restless, the clouds scud along in the wind, their shadows hurrying over the burned hills. The last of the harvesting will soon be over and there are angry rumblings among the field labourers because they have nothing left to eat. Sometimes in the evening I see the red smoke of fires in the cane fields, then the sky turns a strange colour, a glaring, ominous red that hurts your eyes and makes your throat tighten. In spite of the danger I walk through the fields almost every day to see the fires. I go out as far as Yemen, sometimes as far as Tamarin Estate, or make my way up towards Magenta and Belle Rive. From high up on the Tourelle I see other clouds of smoke rising in the north over by Clarence or Marcenay on the outskirts of Wolmar. Now I’m alone. Ever since the journey in the pirogue my father has forbidden me to see Denis. He doesn’t come to Boucan any more. Laure says she heard Denis’s grandf
ather, Capt’n Cook, shouting at him, because Denis came to see him in spite of the restriction. Since then he’s disappeared. It has made me feel as if there is an emptiness, a great solitude here, as if my parents, Laure and I are Boucan’s last inhabitants.
So I wander out very far, farther and farther. I climb to the top of the high Creole walls and search for the smoke of the revolts. I run through the fields, devastated from the harvests. There are still labourers in places, very poor, old women dressed in gunny cloth, gleaning or cutting the couch grass with their sickles. When they see me, my face tanned and clothes stained with red earth, barefoot and carrying my shoes slung around my neck, they shout at me to drive me away, because they’re afraid. No white person ever comes out this far. Sometimes the sirdars also insult me and throw stones and I run through the cane until I’m out of breath. I hate the sirdars. I despise them more than anything in the world, because they are unfeeling and cruel, and because they beat the poor people with sticks when the bundles of cane don’t reach the cart fast enough. But in the evening they get paid double and then get drunk on arak. They’re cowardly and obsequious with the field managers, they take off their caps when they speak to them and feign being fond of the people they’ve just mistreated. There are men in the fields who are almost naked, covered only with a tattered piece of cloth, pulling out the cane stubble with heavy iron pincers that are called ‘macchabées’. They carry blocks of basalt over to the ox cart on their shoulders, then go and pile them up at the end of the field, making new pyramids. They are the people Mam calls ‘the martyrs of the cane’. They sing as they work and I really like hearing their monotone voices in the lonely expanse of the plantations as I’m sitting up on top of a black pyramid. Just for myself I like to sing the old Creole song Capt’n Cook used to sing to Laure and me when we were very small, the one that goes: