The Prospector

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  At what point do I realize that the wind is easing off? I don’t know. Before the roar of the sea and the cracking of trees come to an end, deep within, I am convinced that something has been released. I breathe in, the tight vice around my temples loosens.

  Then suddenly the wind falls and once again we are surrounded by a profound silence. We can hear water trickling everywhere, on the roof, in the trees, even in the house, thousands of rivulets trickling down. The bamboo is cracking. Daylight returns, little by little, and it is the soft, warm light of dusk. Mam opens the shutters. We just sit there, not daring to move, clinging tightly to one another, looking out the window at the shapes of the mountains emerging from the clouds, and they are like familiar, reassuring people.

  That’s when Mam begins to cry, because she has no strength left and when calm is suddenly restored she just can’t hold up any more. I remember that Laure and I begin to cry too, I don’t think I’ve ever cried that much since. Afterwards we all lie down on the floor and sleep, huddling together because of the cold.

  We are awakened at dawn by the sound of our father’s voice. Had he arrived during the night? I remember his distraught face, his mud-stained clothing. Then he tells us how, at the height of the hurricane, he jumped out of his carriage and lay down in a ditch at the side of the road. That’s when the tempest passed over him, sweeping the carriage and the horse away God only knows where. He saw incredible things, boats hurled inland that landed in the branches of the trees of the Intendance. The swollen sea invading the river inlets, drowning people in their cabins. Above all the wind that tossed everything upside down, that tore the roofs off houses, that snapped the smokestacks off sugar mills and demolished the hangars and destroyed half of Port Louis. When he was able to get out of the ditch he took shelter for the night in one of the blacks’ cabins over by Médine, because the roads were flooded. At daybreak an Indian had given him a lift to Tamarin Estate in his wagon, and to reach Boucan my father had to cross the river with the water up to his chest. He also talks about the barometer. My father was in an office in Rempart Street when the barometer fell. He says it was incredible, terrifying. He’d never seen a barometer go so low in such a short time. How can the fall of mercury be terrifying? It’s something I can’t comprehend, but the sound of my father’s voice when he spoke of it rings in my ears and I’ll never be able to forget it.

  Later on there’s a sort of fever that heralds the end of our happiness. Now we’re living in the northern wing of the house, in the only rooms spared by the cyclone. On the southern side the house is half caved in, devastated by water and wind. The roof has holes in it, the veranda no longer exists. Another thing I won’t be able to forget is the tree that crashed through the wall of the house, the long black branch that came through the shutter of the dining-room window and remains there, immobile like the claw of some fantastic animal that struck with lightning force.

  Laure and I have ventured up into the attic using the mangled staircase. The water gushed in furiously through the holes in the roof, devastating everything. Only a few soggy pages remain of the piles of books and journals. We can’t even walk around in the attic any more, because the floor is torn up in several places, the roof beams are disjointed. The mild winds that come in from the sea every evening make the whole of the weakened structure of the house creak. A wreck, that’s what our house truly looks like, the wreck of a sunken ship. We roam around the grounds to assess the extent of the disaster. We look for what was there yesterday, the handsome trees, the planted palmettos, guava trees, mango trees, flower beds of rhododendrons, of bougainvilleas, hibiscuses. We wander about, teetering as if we were recovering from a long illness. Everywhere we see the battered, defiled earth, strewn with crushed grass, with broken branches, and the trees with their roots turned skyward. Laure and I go down as far as the cane fields, over by Yemen and Tamarin, and everywhere the immature cane lies flattened in the fields as if it has been cut down with a gigantic scythe.

  Even the sea has changed. From up on the Etoile I watch the large mud stains spreading out over the lagoon. There’s no longer a village at the mouth of Black River. I think of Denis, was he able to escape?

  Laure and I sit perched atop a Creole pyramid in the middle of the devastated fields almost all day long. There’s a strange odour in the air, a stale smell wafting in on the wind. And yet the sky is cloudless and the sun is burning our hands and faces like it does at the height of summer. Around Boucan the mountains are dark green, sharp, they seem closer than before. We gaze at it all, the sea out beyond the reefs, the bright sky, the battered earth, just like that, not thinking about anything, our eyes stinging with weariness. There’s no one in the fields, no one walking down the paths.

  Silence fills our house as well. No one has come out since the storm. We eat just a little rice with some hot tea. Mam stays prone on a makeshift bed in my father’s office and we sleep in the hallway, because those are the only places the cyclone spared. One morning I accompany my father out to Bassin aux Aigrettes. We walk in silence over the devastated land. We already know what we will find and it makes our throats tighten. At one point an old black gunny woman is sitting by the side of the path in front of what is left of her home. As we go by her plaint grows slightly louder and my father stops to give her a coin. As soon as we reach the pool we immediately see what remains of the generator. The lovely machine is lying on its side, half-submerged in muddy water. The shed has disappeared and all that is left of the turbine are unrecognizable pieces of bent metal. My father stops, says in a loud, clear voice, ‘That’s it.’ He’s tall and pale, the sunlight is shining on his black hair and beard. He draws nearer to the generator, paying no attention to the mud that comes up to his thighs. He makes an almost childish gesture to attempt to set the machine upright. Then he turns around and walks down the path. When he passes me, he puts his hand on my neck and says, ‘Come on, let’s head back.’ That moment is truly tragic, at the time I feel as if everything is finished, for ever, and my eyes and throat fill with tears. Following rapidly in my father’s footsteps, I watch his tall, thin, stooped figure.

  Those are the days when everything moves towards its end, but we aren’t yet certain of that. Laure and I sense a more precise threat. It begins with the first news from the outside, rumours spread around by the plantation labourers, the gunnies from Yemen, from Walhalla. The news reaches us reiterated, amplified, relating the island devastated by the cyclone. The city of Port Louis, my father says, has been wiped off the map, as if it had been bombarded. Most of the wooden houses were destroyed and entire streets have disappeared, Rue Madame, Rue Emmikillen, Rue Poivre. From Signal Mountain to Champ de Mars there is nothing but ruins. Public buildings, churches have collapsed, and people were burned alive in explosions. My father tells us that at four o’clock in the afternoon the barometer was at its lowest point and the wind was blowing at over a hundred miles an hour with gusts of up to a hundred and twenty miles, they say. The sea became alarmingly swollen, covering the shores, and boats were thrown as far as a hundred metres inland. At Rempart River the sea caused the already high waters to overflow the riverbanks and the inhabitants were drowned. The names of destroyed villages makes a long list: Beau Bassin, Rose Hill, Quatre Bornes, Vacoas, Phoenix, Palma, Médine, Beaux Songes. In Bassin, on the other side of Trois Mamelles, the roof of a sugar mill fell in, burying one hundred and thirty people who had taken shelter there. In Phoenix sixty were killed and still more in Bambous, in Belle Eau and in the north of the island, in Mapou, in Mont Goût, in Forbach. The number of victims increases every day, people swept away in the river of mud, crushed under houses, under trees. My father says there are several hundred dead, but the following days the figure is a thousand, then one thousand five hundred.

  Laure and I stay outside all day, hiding in the battered thickets around the house, not daring to venture very far away. We go to see the ravine in which the torrent is still very angry, hauling mud and broken branches. Or else, from high
in the chalta tree, we watch the devastated fields lit up in the sun. The women in their gunny sacks are gathering the immature cane and pulling it along on the muddy ground. Starving children come to steal the fallen fruit and cabbage palms around our house.

  Mam waits silently inside the house. She’s lying on the floor of the office, wrapped in blankets in spite of the heat. Her face is burning with fever and her eyes are red, with a painful sheen to them. My father sits on the ruined veranda, gazing at the tree line in the distance, smoking cigarettes, not speaking to anyone.

  Later, Cook comes back with his daughter. He speaks briefly of Black River, sunken boats, destroyed houses. Cook, who is very old, says he hasn’t seen anything like that since the first time he came to the island when he was a slave. There’d been the hurricane that had toppled the chimney from the residence and almost killed Governor Barkly, but he says it wasn’t as bad as this. We think that, since Old Cook isn’t dead and that now he’s come home, everything will go back to the way it was before. But he looks at what is left of his cabin, shaking his head, he nudges a few boards with his foot and, before we realize what is happening, he turns and leaves. ‘Where’s Cook?’ asks Laure. His daughter shrugs her shoulders. ‘He gone, Mamsell Laure.’ ‘But he’s coming back?’ There is a worried tone in Laure’s voice. ‘When is he coming back?’ Cook’s daughter’s answer makes our hearts sink, ‘God knows, Mamsell Laure. Might be never.’ She’s come to get some food and a little money. Capt’n Cook won’t live here any more, he’ll never come back, we’re well aware of that.

  So Boucan remains as it has been since the storm: lonely, abandoned by the world. A black man came from the plantation with his oxen to pull out the tree trunk that had ripped open the dining room. We helped my father clear away all the debris strewn about the house: papers, glass, shattered dishes mingled with branches and leaves, with mud. With the holes in its walls, the veranda in ruins, and the roof through which we can see the sky, our house looks even more like a shipwrecked vessel. And we are castaways, clinging to our ship in the hopes that everything will go back to the way it was before.

  To ward off the anxiety that is mounting daily, Laure and I roam farther and farther away, across the cane fields, all the way out to where the forests begin. We go out every day, drawn by the dark valley of Mananava, the home of the tropicbirds who circle up so very high in the sky. But they too have disappeared. I think the hurricane must have carried them off, dashed them against the walls of the gorges, or else thrown them so far out to sea that they will never be able to come back.

  We search for them every day in the empty sky. There is a dreadful silence in the forest, as if the wind will soon return.

  Where can we go? There’s no one around any more, you can’t hear the sound of dogs barking on the farms any more or the cries of children near the streams. There are no more wisps of smoke in the sky. Perched atop a Creole pyramid, we search the horizon, over by Clarence, over by Wolmar. The chimneys have stopped. To the south, down by Black River, there isn’t a trace in the sky. We don’t talk. We just sit there, baking in the noonday sun, gazing at the sea in the distance until our eyes sting.

  In the evening, we head back towards Boucan, feeling heavy-hearted. The wreck is still there, half-crumbled to the still damp earth in the ruins of the devastated garden. We slip furtively into the house, barefooted on the floorboards, where the dried mud has already left a layer of gritty dust, but our father hasn’t even noticed our absence. We eat whatever we can find, starved from our distant wanderings: fruits we’ve gleaned from neighbouring properties, eggs, the ‘lampangue’ or the dry crust stuck to the bottom of the large pot of rice my father boils every morning.

  One day when we’re over by the forest, Koenig, the doctor from Floréal, comes to see Mam. Laure notices the tracks of his carriage in the muddy lane when we get back. I don’t dare go any farther, I stand there, waiting, trembling, while Laure runs to the veranda, leaps into the house. When I go in afterwards, through the north entrance, I see Laure holding Mam tightly in her arms, her head lying against Mam’s breast. Mam is smiling in spite of her weariness. She goes over to the cupboard upon which the alcohol stove sits. She wants to heat up some rice, make some tea for us.

  ‘Eat, children, eat. It’s so late, where have you been?’

  She speaks rapidly with a sort of breathlessness, but her good cheer is genuine.

  ‘We’ll soon be going away, we’re leaving Boucan.’

  ‘Where are we going, Mam?’

  ‘Ah, I shouldn’t be telling you, it’s not sure yet, I mean, the decision hasn’t been completely made. We’ll go to Forest Side. Your father has found a house, not far from your aunt Adelaide.’

  She hugs us both tightly and we can feel nothing but her happiness, can think of nothing else.

  My father has gone back to town, probably in Koenig’s carriage. He must make preparations for our departure, for the new house in Forest Side. Later I learned of everything he did that day to attempt to fend off the inevitable. I learned of all the papers he signed for the usurpers in town, the acknowledgements of debts, the mortgages, the secured loans. All the arable lands of Boucan, the wastelands, the gardens around the house, the stands of trees, even the house itself, everything was pawned, sold. He was in over his head. He’d put his last hope into that crazy idea, that electrical generator for the Mare aux Aigrettes that was to bring progress to the entire western side of the island and that was now no more than a heap of scrap metal sunk in the mud. How could we, who were only children, have understood that? But at the time we didn’t need to understand things. Little by little we were able to guess what we were not told. When the hurricane had stopped we knew very well that everything had already been lost. It was like the flood.

  ‘Will Uncle Ludovic come to live here when we’re gone?’ asks Laure.

  There is so much anger and grief in her voice that Mam can’t answer. She turns her eyes away.

  ‘He did this! He’s the one who did all this!’ says Laure. I wish she’d be quiet. She’s pale and trembling, her voice is trembling too. ‘I hate him!’ ‘Be quiet,’ says Mam. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But Laure doesn’t want to let it drop. She stands up for herself for the first time, as if she were defending it all, everything we love, this house in ruins, this garden, the tall trees, our ravine, and even beyond, the dark mountains, the sky, the sound of the sea borne along on the wind. ‘Why didn’t he help us? Why didn’t he do anything? Why does he want us to go away, so he can take our house?’ Mam is sitting on the deckchair in the shade of the mangled veranda, like in the old days when she was preparing to read us the Holy Scriptures or begin a dictation. But today a lot of time has gone by in just one day and we know none of that will ever be possible again. That’s why Laure is shouting and her voice is trembling and tears are welling up in her eyes, because she wants to express how much pain she’s feeling, ‘Why did he get everyone to turn against us, when he’s so rich, he could have just said one word! Why does he want us to go away, to take our house, take our garden, and plant sugar cane everywhere?’ ‘Be quiet, be quiet!’ shouts Mam. Her face is tense with anger, with distress. Laure has stopped shouting. She’s standing in front of us, filled with shame, her eyes shiny with tears, and all of a sudden she turns around, jumps into the dark garden and runs away. I run after her. ‘Laure! Laure! Come back!’ I look for her hastily in vain. Then I think it over, I know where she is, as if I could see her through the underbrush. This is the last time. She’s in our hiding place on the other side of the devastated palmetto field, up on the main branch of the tamarind tree above the ravine, listening to the sound of the rushing water. In the ravine the light is ashen, night has already begun. A few birds have already come back and some insects are humming.

  Laure isn’t up on the branch. She’s sitting on a large rock near the tamarind tree. Her light-blue dress is stained with mud. She’s barefoot.

  When I arrive, she doesn’t move. She�
�s not crying. There’s that obstinate expression that I love on her face. I think she’s happy I came. I sit down next to her, put my arms around her. We talk. We don’t talk about Uncle Ludovic or about our impending departure, none of that. We talk about other things, about Denis, as if he would come back, bringing strange objects, like in the old days, a turtle egg, a head feather from a bulbul, a seed from a dodo tree, or things from the sea, shells, stones, amber. We also talk about Nada the Lily and we have to talk about that a lot because the hurricane destroyed our collection of journals, blew it all the way up to the top of the mountains maybe. When night has truly fallen, we shimmy up the inclined trunk and lie there for a moment, suspended in the darkness, arms and legs dangling over the drop.

  That night is long, like nights that precede a long journey. And it’s true, leaving the Boucan Valley will be the first journey we’ve ever taken. We’re lying on the floor, wrapped in our blankets, looking at the night light wavering at the end of the hallway, not sleeping. If we do drift off to sleep it’s only for an instant. In the silent night we can hear the rustling of Mam’s long white nightgown as she paces around the empty office. We hear her sigh, and when she goes back to sit in the easy chair next to the window we are able to go back to sleep.

  At dawn my father comes back. He’s brought a horse-drawn cart along and an Indian from Port Louis whom we don’t know, a tall, thin man who looks like a seafarer. My father and the Indian load the furniture that was spared by the hurricane into the cart: some armchairs, kitchen chairs, tables, a wardrobe that was in Mam’s room, her brass bed and her deckchair. Then the trunks that contain the treasure papers, and the clothing. For us it’s not really a departure, since we don’t have anything to take along. All of our books, all of our toys disappeared in the storm, and the bundles of journals no longer exist. We have no other clothes but the ones we’re wearing, which are stained and torn from our long escapades in the underbrush. It’s better this way. What could we have brought along? What we needed were the garden and its lovely trees, the walls of our house and its sky-coloured roof, Capt’n Cook’s little hut, the hills of Tamarin and the Etoile, the mountains, and the dark valley of Mananava, where the two tropicbirds live. We stand in the sun while my father loads the last objects into the cart.