The Prospector

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  I feel something aching deep down inside, because I know where I am. This is where our garden began and, a little farther up – at the end of the pathway – I would have seen our house, its blue roof shining in the sunlight. I walk through the tall weeds, getting scratched by the thorn bushes. There’s nothing left here. Everything’s been destroyed, burned, pillaged, for so many years. Perhaps this is where our veranda began? I think I recognize a tree, then another. But at the same time I notice ten more that look just like it, tamarind, mango trees, she-oaks. I trip over unfamiliar rocks, stumble into holes. Is this really where we lived? Wasn’t it in some other world?

  I keep going, feverishly, feeling the blood pounding in my temples. I want to find something, a bit of our land. When I talked about it to Mam, her eyes lit up, I’m sure of it. I was holding her hand very tightly in mine, trying to give her my life, my strength. I talked about it all as if our house still existed. I talked to her as if nothing ever had to end, as if the years that were lost would be reborn in our sweltering garden in the month of December, when Laure and I would listen to her lilting voice reading Bible History.

  I want to hear her voice now, here in this place in the wild underbrush, among these piles of black rocks that were the foundations of our house. Walking up in the direction of the hills I suddenly catch sight of the ravine where we spent so many hours perched on the main branch of the tree, watching the water in the nameless stream flow by. It’s difficult to recognize. While everywhere else the terrain has been overrun with weeds and underbrush, here everything is barren, arid, like after a wildfire. My heart is beating very hard, because this is where our – Laure’s and my territory, our secret place really was. But now it’s nothing but a ravine, a dark, ugly, lifeless crevice. Where is the tree, our tree? I think I recognize it, an old blackened trunk with broken branches, sparse leaves. It is so ugly, so small I can’t imagine how we could have climbed it back then. When I lean out over the ravine, I see that wondrous branch upon which we would lie and it is like an emaciated arm extended over the void. Below, at the bottom of the ravine, water is flowing among the debris of branches, bits of sheet metal, old boards. The ravine was used as a dump when our house was demolished.

  I didn’t tell Mam any of that. It was no longer important . I talked to her about everything that used to be, that was even more true, more real, than this ravaged land. I talked to her about what she loved most, the garden filled with hibiscuses, with poinsettias, arums, and her white orchids. I talked to her about the large oval pond in front of the veranda where we could hear the toads singing. I also talked to her about the things I loved, that I would never forget, her voice when she used to read us a poem or when she recited the evening prayers. The path we would all walk solemnly down together to look at the stars, listening to our father’s explanations.

  I stay until nightfall, wandering through the underbrush, searching for traces, clues, searching for smells, for memories. But it’s a dry, broken land, the irrigation ditches have been stopped up for years now. The remaining trees have been burned by the sun. There are no more mango or medlar or jackfruit trees. The tamarind trees, tall and scrawny as in Rodrigues, are still there and the banyans that never die. I’m trying to find the chalta tree, the tree of good and evil. I have the feeling that, if I succeed in finding it, something from the old days will have been saved. I recall it being at the end of the garden, on the edge of the fallow lands, where the path leading to the mountains and the Black River Gorges began. I walk through the underbrush, hastily climb up to the high end of the property, where you can see Terre Rouge and the Brise-Fer mountains. Then, suddenly, I see it right in front of me, in the midst of the underbrush, even taller than before, with its dark foliage making a lake of shade. I walk up to it and recognize its smell, a subtle, disquieting fragrance that used to make our heads swim when we would climb in its branches. It hasn’t surrendered, hasn’t been destroyed. To it, the whole time I was away, far from the shelter of its leaves, far from its branches, was but a moment. The storm waters have passed, the droughts, the wildfires, and even the men who demolished our house, who trampled on the flowers in the garden and let the water in the pond and the irrigation ditches dry up. But it has remained the tree of good and evil that knows all, sees all. I look for the marks Laure and I made on it with a knife, to write our names and how tall we were. I look for the wound of the branch the cyclone ripped off. Its shade is deep and cool, its odour inebriates me. Time has stopped its course. The air is vibrating with insects, with birds, the earth under it is damp and alive.

  Here the world knows no hunger or misfortune. War doesn’t exist. The chalta tree holds the world at bay by the strength of its branches. Our house was destroyed, our father is dead, but nothing is hopeless because I’ve found the chalta tree. I’ll be able to sleep under it. Outside, night comes, obliterates the mountains. Everything I’ve ever done, ever searched for, was simply to bring me here, to the entrance to Mananava.

  How long has it been since Mam died? Was it yesterday or the day before? I’m not sure any more. During the days and nights that we stayed by her side, taking turns, me during the day, Laure at night, so that she would constantly have a hand to hold in her thin fingers. Every day I told her the same story, the story of Boucan, where everything is always young and beautiful, where the sky-coloured roof shines. It’s a make-believe land, it only exists for us three. And I think that, from having talked about it so much, a bit of that immortality is within us, unites us against death, which is so near.

  As for Laure, she doesn’t talk. On the contrary, she’s silent, obstinate, but that’s her way of struggling against oblivion. I brought back a small branch of the chalta tree for her and when I gave it to her I saw she hadn’t forgotten. Her eyes shone with pleasure when she took the branch, which she laid on the nightstand or rather tossed there, as if inadvertently, because that’s the way she acts with objects she loves.

  There was that terrible morning when Laure came to wake me up, standing in front of the cot with canvas webbing where I sleep in the empty dining room. I remember how she looked, hair tangled, that hard, angry gleam in her eye.

  ‘Mam’s dead.’

  That’s all she said, and I followed her, still sluggish from sleep, into the dark room where the night light shone. I looked at Mam, her thin, regular face, her lovely hair spread out upon the very white pillow. Laure went to lie down on the cot in turn and fell asleep immediately, arms crossed over her face. And I remained alone in the dark room with Mam, dazed, bewildered, sitting on a creaking chair in front of the quivering night light, ready to start telling my story again any minute, talking in hushed tones about the large garden where we used to walk together in the evenings to explore the heavens, talking about the paths strewn with tamarind hulls and hibiscus petals, about listening to the shrill song of mosquitoes that danced around our hair and, when we turned around, the joy of seeing the large window of the office where my father sat smoking and looking at his nautical charts lit up in the blue night.

  And this morning, standing in the rain in the cemetery near Bigara, I’m listening to the earth fall on to the coffin, and looking at Laure’s pale face, her hair covered tightly with Mam’s black shawl, drops of water running down her cheeks like tears.

  How long has Mam been gone? I can’t believe it. It’s all come to an end, there will never again be the sound of her voice talking in the dusk light on the veranda, never again the smell of her perfume, the warmth of her gaze. When my father died it seems as if I began sliding downhill backwards, towards a forgetfulness I can’t accept, which is pulling me away once and for all from what used to be my strength – youth. The treasures are inaccessible, impossible. They are the ‘fool’s gold’ that the black prospectors showed me when I arrived in Port Mathurin.

  Laure and I are now alone in this old empty, cold shack with closed shutters. In Mam’s room the wick of the night light has drowned and I light another one on the night stand, among the pointless p
hials, beside the bed with livid sheets.

  ‘Nothing would have happened if I’d stayed… It’s all my fault, I shouldn’t have left her.’

  ‘But you had to go, didn’t you?’ Laure is asking herself the question.

  I look at her worriedly.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know, stay here, I suppose.’

  ‘Come with me!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Mananava. We can live on the pas géométriques.’

  She looks at me ironically, ‘All three of us, along with Yangue-catéra?’ That’s what she calls Ouma.

  But her eyes grow cold again. Her expression is one of weariness, of remoteness.

  ‘You know very well that’s impossible.’

  ‘But why?’

  She doesn’t respond. She looks straight through me. I suddenly realize that, during my years of exile, I lost her. She followed a different path, became a different person, our lives don’t fit together any more. Her life is with the nuns of the Visitation, where penniless, homeless women err. Her place is by the side of the hydropsical, cancer-ridden Indian women, who beg for a few rupees, a smile, words of consolation. By the side of feverish children with bloated bellies, for whom she cooks pots of rice, for whom she niggles a little money from her fellow ‘bourzois’.

  For an instant there’s a note of solicitude in her voice, as in the old days when I would walk barefoot across the room to slip out into the night.

  ‘And you, what are you going to do?’

  I boast, ‘Well, I’m going to pan in the river like they do in the Klondike. I’m sure there’s gold in Mananava.’

  Yes, for an instant, her eyes shine again with amusement, we’re close again, we’re ‘sweethearts’, as people used to say when they saw us together.

  Later, I look at her while she’s packing her little suitcase to go and live with the sisters of Loreto. Her face is calm, indifferent once again. Only her eyes are bright with a sort of anger. She wraps her lovely black hair in Mam’s shawl and walks away without looking back, carrying her little cardboard suitcase and holding her large umbrella up high and straight, and from now on nothing can hold her or turn her from her course.

  All day long I remain at the estuary of the rivers, facing the Barachois, watching the tide going out, uncovering the black sand of the beaches. When it is low tide some tall, black adolescents come to fish for octopuses, and they look like wading birds in the copper-coloured water. The bravest ones come over to see me. One of them, having taken me for a British soldier because of my army shirt, addresses me in English. So as not to disappoint him, I answer in English as well and we talk for a moment, he standing, leaning on a long harpoon, me sitting in the sand, smoking a cigarette in the shade of some velvet soldierbushes.

  Then he goes back to the other young boys and I hear their voices and their laughter dying out on the other side of the Tamarin River. Now there are only the fishermen standing in their pirogues, sliding slowly over the water that is reflecting their image.

  I wait for the first thrust of the tide to send a wave up on to the sand. The wind is coming in, just like back in the old days, the sound of the sea makes me shudder. Then, with my duffel bag over my shoulder, I walk back up the river towards Boucan. Before reaching Yemen, I veer off into the underbrush where our lane used to start, that wide path of red earth that ran between the trees straight up to our very white house with its azure-coloured roof. I remember us walking down that lane such a long time ago, when the bailiffs and Uncle Ludovic’s lawmen drove us away. Now the lane has disappeared, swallowed up by the weeds, and, along with it, the world it once led to.

  How beautiful and ashen the light is here, just like the light that used to envelop me out on the veranda as I watched evening creep over the garden! The light is the only thing I recognize. I walk through the underbrush and don’t even try to see the chalta tree or the ravine again. Like the seabirds, I’m feeling hurried, fretful at the coming of night. Now I’m walking quickly southwards, guided by Mont Terre Rouge. Suddenly, in front of me, a pool flashes with light from the sky: it’s the Bassin aux Aigrettes, the place where my father had set up his generator. Overrun with weeds and reeds, the pond is now abandoned. Nothing is left of my father’s construction work. The dams, the metal frames supporting the dynamo, were carted off long ago, and the dynamo was sold to pay debts. The water, the mud, have erased my father’s dream. Birds fly up, squawking, as I walk around the pond to take the path to the gorges.

  Once past Brise-Fer Mountain I can see the Black River Valley beneath me and, off in the distance, between the trees, the sea glittering in the sunlight. Here I am, facing Mananava, drenched with sweat, breathless, apprehensive. As I start into the gorge I feel a pang of anxiety. Is this where I am to live now, a castaway? In the blazing light of the setting sun, the shadows cast by Machabé and Pied de la Marmite mountains make the gorges seem even darker. Up above Mananava the red cliffs form an insurmountable barrier. To the south, in the direction of the sea, I can see the smoke from the sugar mills and the villages, Case Noyale, Black River. Mananava is the end of the world, where one can see without being seen.

  I’m in the very heart of the valley now, in the shade of the tall trees, night has already begun. The wind is blowing in from the sea and I can hear the sound of the leaves, those invisible movements, those sudden dashes, those dances. I’ve never been this far into the heart of Mananava. As I walk through the shadows under the still very bright sky, the forest opens out before me, boundless. Everywhere there are ebony trees with smooth trunks, turpentine and colophony trees, wild fig trees, sycamores. My feet sink into the carpet of leaves, I breathe in the stale odour of the earth, the humidity of the sky. I walk up the bed of a torrent. As I go, I gather dasheen, red guavas, coromandel. This freedom fills me with a feeling of exhilaration. Isn’t this the place where I was always meant to be? Isn’t this the place that the Mysterious Corsair’s maps pointed to, this valley forgotten to everyone, with the same orientation as the lines of the Argo constellation? Just like long ago in English Bay, as I’m walking through the trees, my heart starts pulsing in my ears. I’m aware that I’m not alone in Mananava. Somewhere, close by, someone is walking in the forest, following a path that is going to intersect mine. Someone is slipping noiselessly through the leaves and I can feel a gaze upon me, a gaze that is penetrating everything and shining upon me. Soon I emerge facing the cliff, still lit up in the sun. I’m above the forest, near the sources of the rivers, and I can see the foliage undulating all the way out to the sea. The sky is stunning, the sun slips behind the horizon. This is where I will sleep, facing westwards, among the blocks of lava, warm with light. This will be my house, from where I will always see the sea.

  Now I see Ouma coming out of the forest towards me with her light step. At the same time I see the two white birds appear. Very high in the colourless sky, they are gliding in the wind, circling Mananava. Have they seen me? Silently, one beside the other, almost without moving their wings, like two white comets, they are gazing at the halo of the sun on the horizon. Thanks to them the world has stopped, the course of the stars has been suspended. Their bodies alone are moving in the wind…

  Ouma is near me. I can smell the odour, sense the warmth of her body. I say in a soft whisper, ‘Look! They’re the ones I used to see, it’s them…!’ Their flight carries them towards Mont Machabé, as the sky begins to change, grow grey. Suddenly they disappear behind the mountains, plunge towards Black River, and it is night.

  We dream days of happiness in Mananava, far from human beings. We live a wild life, busied only with trees, berries, herbs, water from the sources that spring from the red cliff. We catch crayfish in an arm of the Black River, and near the estuary, shrimp, crabs, under flat stones. I remember the stories that old Capt’n Cook used to tell me, with Zako the monkey who went fishing for shrimp with his tail.

  Here everything is simple. At dawn we slip quietly into the fores
t – quivering with dew – to gather red guavas, wild cherries, Madagascar plums, wild sweetsop, or to pick dasheen, wild christophines, bitter melons. We live in the same place the maroons did back in the days of the great Sacalavou, in Sengor’s time. ‘Over there, look! Those were their fields. And that’s where they kept their pigs, their goats, their chickens. They grew fava beans, lentils, yams, corn.’ Ouma shows me the tumbled-down, low walls, piles of stones covered with brush. Up against a lava cliff a thorn bush hides the entrance to a cave. Ouma brings me sweet-smelling flowers. She puts them in her heavy mane of hair, behind her ears. ‘Blackcurrant flowers.’

  She’s never been so beautiful, her black hair framing her smooth face, her svelte body in her faded and patched gunny-cloth dress.

  So I never think about gold, I have no desire for it any more. I’ve left my pan by the stream near the source, and I roam the forest, following Ouma. My clothing has been torn by branches, my hair and beard have grown long just like Robinson’s. With strips of screw pine Ouma weaves a hat for me and I don’t think any one would recognize me in this accoutrement.

  We’ve gone down to the mouth of Black River several times, but Ouma is afraid of being seen, because of the gunny revolt. All the same, we did go out as far as the Tamarin River estuary once at daybreak and walked over the black sand. At that time of day everything is still covered with the dawn mist and there is a cold wind blowing. Half-hidden among the screw pines, we watched the choppy sea, filled with waves spitting up foam. There’s nothing more beautiful in the world.

  Sometimes Ouma goes fishing in the lagoon, over around the Tourelle or out by the salt fields to see her brother. She brings back fish for me in the evening and we grill it in our hiding place near the sources.

  Every evening, when the sun goes down towards the sea, we sit very still in the rocks, waiting for the tropicbirds to arrive. They appear very high up in the light-filled sky, soaring slowly along like stars. They’ve built their nest in the cliffs, around Machabé. They are so lovely, so white, they glide through the sky on the sea breeze for such a long time that we no longer feel hungry or fatigued or worried about tomorrow. Are they not eternal? Ouma says they’re the two birds that sing the praise of God. We watch for them every day at twilight, because they make us happy.