The Prospector

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  Contents

  Boucan Embayment, 1892

  Forest Side

  Heading for Rodrigues, 1910

  Rodrigues, English Bay, 1911

  Ypres, winter 1915, Somme, spring 1916

  Heading for Rodrigues, summer 1918–1919

  Mananava, 1922

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  to my grandfather Léon

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  ‌Boucan Embayment, 1892

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  As far back as I can remember, the sound of the sea has been in my ears. Mingled with that of the wind in the needles of the she-oaks, the wind that never stops, even when you leave the coast behind and cross the cane fields, it’s the sound of my childhood. I can still hear it now, deep down inside of me, it accompanies me wherever I go. The slow, tireless sound of the waves breaking out on the coral reefs in the distance and then coming up to die on the sand of Black River. There’s never a day I don’t go down to the sea, nor a night that I don’t wake up, sit up in my cot, back damp with sweat, pull aside the mosquito net and try to hear the tide, fretful, filled with a yearning I don’t understand.

  I think of the sea as a person and – in the darkness – all of my senses are alert to better hear it coming, better welcome it. The giant waves leap over the reefs, come crashing down into the lagoon, and the noise makes the earth and the air quake like a blast furnace. I can hear it, it’s moving, breathing.

  When there’s a full moon I slip silently out of bed, being careful not to make the worm-eaten floorboards crack. Even though I know Laure isn’t sleeping, I know her eyes are open in the dark and that she’s holding her breath. I climb over the windowsill and push open the wooden shutters – I’m outside in the night. The white moonlight is shining on the garden, I can see the silvery trees whose crowns are whispering in the wind, I can make out the dark flowerbeds planted with rhododendrons, with hibiscuses. Heart racing, I walk down the pathway that leads out to the hills where the fallow lands begin. Right next to the crumbled-down wall stands the tall chalta tree, the one Laure calls the tree of good and evil, and I climb up on the main branches to look at the sea and the vast stretches of sugar cane over the treetops. The moon rolls around between the clouds, throwing out flashes of light. Then maybe I suddenly catch sight of it, out over the leaves to the left of the Tourelle de Tamarin, a large inky pool where a shiny patch is glittering. Do I really see it, do I hear it? The sea is inside my head and it’s when I close my eyes that I can see and hear it best, listen to every rumble of the waves being parted on the reefs, then merging once again to come washing up on the shore. I sit clinging to the branches of the chalta tree for a long time, until my arms grow numb. The sea breeze blows through the trees and the cane fields, makes the leaves shimmer in the moonlight. Sometimes I stay until dawn, just listening, dreaming. At the other end of the garden the large house is dark, closed up, like a shipwreck. The wind makes the loose clapboards bang, makes the frame creak. That too is the sound of the sea along with the creaking of the tree trunk, the whimpering of the she-oak needles. I’m afraid, all alone up in the tree, and yet I don’t want to go back to the bedroom. I struggle against the chill of the wind, the weariness making my head feel heavy.

  It’s not really fear. It’s like standing at the edge of a chasm, a deep ravine, and staring down intently with your heart beating so hard that your neck throbs and grows painful, and yet you know you have to stay there, that you’re finally going to understand something. I can’t go back to the bedroom as long as the tide is rising, it’s impossible. I have to stay clinging to the chalta tree and wait while the moon slides over to the other side of the sky. I go back to the bedroom and duck under the mosquito net just before dawn, when the sky is turning grey over in the direction of Mananava. I hear Laure sigh, because she hasn’t been able to sleep either the whole time I was outside. She never talks to me about it. She just looks at me the next day with those dark, questioning eyes and I regret having gone out to listen to the sea.

  I go down to the shore every day. You have to cross the fields, the cane is so high that I move along blindly, running down the harvest paths, sometimes lost amid the razor-sharp leaves. There, I can’t hear the sea any longer. The late winter sun burns down, smothering the sounds. I can sense it when I’m very near the shore, because the air grows heavy, still, laden with flies. Up above, the sky is blue, taut, birdless, blinding. I sink up to my ankles in the dusty red earth. To avoid damaging my shoes, I take them off and, tying the laces together, carry them strung around my neck. That way my hands are free. You need to have your hands free when crossing a cane field. The stalks are very tall. Cook, the cook, says they’re going to cut them next month. They’ve got leaves as sharp as cane knives; you have to push them aside with the palm of your hand to get through. Denis, Cook’s grandson, is out ahead of me. I can’t see him any more. He’s always gone barefoot. Armed with his pole, he walks faster than I do. To call to one another, we decided to squeak a grass harp twice, or else to bark twice, like this: woua! The men do that, the Indians, when they walk through the tall cane stalks at harvest time with their long knives.

  I can hear Denis far out ahead of me: Woua! Woua! I answer with my harp. There is no other sound. The tide is at its lowest this morning, it won’t rise before noon. We’re moving as fast as we can to get to the tide pools where the shrimp and octopuses hide.

  In front of me, in the middle of the cane, is a stack of lava stones. I love to climb up there to see the green fields stretching away and, far behind me now, lost in the jumble of trees and thickets, our house like a shipwreck, with it’s odd, sky-blue roof and Capt’n Cook’s little hut, and still further off, Yemen’s smokestack and the high red mountains bristling towards the sky. Pivoting at the top of the pyramid, I can see the entire landscape, the smoke from the sugar mills, the Tamarin River winding through the trees, the hills and, finally, the dark, shimmering sea that has drawn back to the other side of the reefs.

  That’s what I really love. I think I could stay up on top of this stack of stones for hours, days, not doing anything, just looking.

  Woua! Woua! Denis is calling me from the other end of the field. He too is on top of a stack of black stones, marooned on a small island in the middle of the ocean. He’s so far away I can’t make out anything about him. I can just see his long insect-like silhouette atop the stack of stones. I cup my hands around my mouth and bark in turn: Woua! Woua! We go back down at the same time and start walking blindly through the cane again towards the sea.

  In the morning the sea is black, closed. It’s the sands from the Big Black River and the Tamarin that do that, lava dust. When you head northward or go down towards the Morne in the south, the sea is more limpid. Denis is fishing for octopuses in the lagoon, shielded by the coral reefs. I watch him walk away on his long stork-like legs, pole in hand. He’s not afraid of sea urchins or stonefish. He walks through the pools of dark water in such a way that his shadow is always behind him. As he goes further and further from the shore he disturbs flights of mangrove herons, of cormorants, sea larks. I watch him, barefoot in the cold water. Often I ask permission to join him, but he doesn’t want me to. He says I’m too young, he says he’s the keeper of my soul. He says my father entrusted me to him. That’s not true, my father has never spoken to him. But I like the way he says ‘the keeper of your soul’. I’m the only one who goes with him out to the seashore. My cousin Ferdinand isn’t allowed to, even though he’s a little older than I am, and neither is Laure, because she’s a girl. I like Denis, he’s my friend. My cousin Ferdinand says he isn’t a friend because he’s black, because he’s Cook’s grandson. But that doesn’t matter to me. Ferdinand only says that because he’s jealous, he too would like to walk through the cane field
s with Denis all the way out to the sea.

  When the tide is very low like this, early in the morning, the black rocks appear. There are large dark pools and others so luminous you’d think they were emitting the light. Urchins make purple balls at the bottom, anemones fan out their blood-red corollas, brittle stars slowly wave their long downy arms. I examine the bottom of the tide pools, while Denis is searching for octopuses with the point of his pole in the distance.

  Out here the sound of the sea is as beautiful as music. The waves come in on the wind, break on the coral barrier, very far away, and I can hear the vibrations in the rocks and then reverberating through the sky. There’s a sort of wall out on the horizon that the sea is pounding, hammering away at. Sprays of foam go shooting up at times, fall back down on the reefs. The tide has begun to rise. This is the time of day when Denis catches octopuses, because they can feel the cool water from the open sea with their tentacles and they come out of their hiding places. One after another, the pools fill with water. The brittle stars wave their arms in the current, clouds of alevins swim up the cascading tide water and I see a boxfish go by looking hurried and stupid. I’ve been coming here for a very long time, ever since I was a little boy. I know every pool, every rock, every nook and cranny, the place where whole communities of urchins can be found, where large holothurians creep, where the eels, the sea centipedes hide. I stand there, not making a move, not making a sound, so they’ll forget me, not see me any more. That’s when the sea is beautiful and so very gentle. When the sun is high up in the sky, over the Tourelle de Tamarin, the water grows light, pale blue, the colour of the sky. The rumbling of the waves on the reefs booms out with all its might. Blinded by the light I blink my eyes, searching for Denis. The sea is coming in through the pass now, its slow waves are swelling, covering the rocks.

  When I reach the beach at the mouth of the two rivers I see Denis sitting on the sand high up on the beach in the shade of some velvet soldierbushes. Hanging from the end of his pole like rags are some ten octopuses. He’s sitting very still, waiting for me. The hot sun is burning down on my shoulders, on my hair. Suddenly, I throw off my clothes on the spot and dive naked into the water, right where the sea meets the two rivers. I swim against the freshwater current until I can feel the sharp little pebbles against my belly and knees. When I’ve made my way completely into the river I grab hold of a large rock with both hands and allow the water of the rivers to run over me, cleanse me of the burn of the sea and the sun.

  Nothing exists any more, everything stands still. This is all there is, what I’m feeling, seeing, the sky so blue, the sound of the sea struggling against the reefs and the cold water flowing over my skin.

  I get out of the water, shivering in spite of the heat, and get dressed without even drying myself off. There’s gritty sand in my shirt, in my trousers, rubbing my feet raw in my shoes. My hair is still matted together with salt. Denis has been watching me. His smooth face is dark, impenetrable. Sitting in the shade of the velvet soldierbushes, he’s remained very still, both hands resting on the long pole where the octopuses hang like tatters. He never bathes in the sea, I don’t even know if he can swim. When he does bathe it’s at nightfall, upstream in the Tamarin River or in the brook in Bassin Salé. Sometimes he goes far up near the mountains in the direction of Mananava and washes himself with plants in the torrents in the gorges. He says his grandfather taught him to do that, to grow strong, to have a man’s penis.

  I like Denis, he knows so many things about the trees, the water, the sea. He learned everything he knows from his grandfather and his grandmother too – an old black woman who lives in Case Noyale. He knows the name of every fish, every insect, he knows all the edible plants in the forest, all the wild fruit, he can recognize a tree simply by its smell or else by chewing a bit of its bark. He knows so many things that you never get bored with him. Laure likes him a lot too, because he always brings back little presents for her, a fruit from the forest or a flower, a shell, a piece of white flint, of obsidian. Ferdinand calls him ‘Friday’ to make fun of us, and he nicknamed me the Wild Woodsman, because one day Uncle Ludovic said that when he saw me coming back from the mountains.

  One day – already a long time ago, in the very beginning of our friendship – Denis brought home a little grey animal for Laure, it was so cute with its pointy snout and he said it was a muskrat, but my father said it was just a shrew. Laure kept it with her for one day and it slept in a little cardboard box on her bed; but in the evening when it was time to go to bed it woke up and started running all around and making so much noise that my father came in in his nightshirt, holding a candle, and he got angry and drove the little animal outside. We never saw it again after that. I think Laure was quite upset about it.

  When the sun is nice and high in the sky Denis stands up, steps out of the shade of the bushes and shouts ‘Alee-sis!’ That’s how he pronounces my name. Then we walk quickly through the cane fields until we reach Boucan. Denis stops to eat at his grandfather’s cabin and I run over to the big house with its sky-blue roof.

  When dawn breaks and the sky grows light behind the peaks of Trois Mamelles, I set out with my cousin Ferdinand along the dirt road that leads to the Yemen cane fields. We scale up high walls and enter the ‘chassés’ or private hunting grounds, the dwelling place of the deer that belong to the big landowners of Wolmar, Tamarin, Magenta, Barefoot and Walhalla. Ferdinand knows where he’s going. His father is very rich, he’s taken him to all the estates. He’s even been as far as the Tamarin Estate houses, as far as Wolmar and Médine all the way up north. It’s forbidden to enter the chassés, my father would be very angry if he knew we were trespassing on these properties. He says it’s dangerous, that there could be hunters, that we could fall into a gulley, but I think it’s mostly because he doesn’t like the people who have large estates. He says that everyone should stay on his own land, that one shouldn’t go wandering about on other people’s land.

  We move along cautiously, as if we were in enemy territory. In the distance, amid the grey underbrush, we glimpse some quick shapes that disappear in the thick of the wood: they’re deer.

  Then Ferdinand says he wants to go down to Tamarin Estate. We come out of the chassés and walk down the long dirt road again. I’ve never been out this far before. Except one day with Denis I hiked all the way up to the top of the Tourelle de Tamarin, the place where you can see the whole lay of the land all the way out to the Trois Mamelles, even out as far as the Morne, and from there I could see the roofs of the houses and the tall chimney of the sugar mill belching out heavy smoke.

  The day grows rapidly hot, because it will soon be summer. The cane is very high. They started cutting it several days ago. All along the road we pass oxen pulling carts, wobbling under the weight of the cane. They’re driven by young Indians who look apathetic, as if they were dozing. The air is filled with black flies, with horseflies. Ferdinand is walking fast, I have a hard time keeping up with him. Every time a cart passes we jump aside into the ditch, because there’s just room enough for the large, iron-rimmed wheels.

  The fields are full of men and women working. The men have harvest knives, sickles, and the women are carrying hoes. The women are clothed in gunny cloth with old burlap bags wrapped around their heads. The men are bare-chested, streaming with sweat. We hear cries, people calling out woua! The red dust is churning up from the paths between the square patches of cane. There’s an acrid smell in the air, the smell of raw cane juice, of dust, of men’s sweat. Feeling a little light-headed, we walk, run down to the Tamarin outbuildings where the cartloads of cane are arriving. No one pays any attention to us. There’s so much dust on the paths that we’re already red from head to toe and our clothes look as if they’re made of gunny cloth. Children are running with us along the paths, Indians, Kaffirs, they’re eating pieces of sugar cane they’ve found on the ground. Everyone is going towards the sugar mill to watch the first pressings.

  We finally reach the buildings. I�
��m a little frightened because it’s the first time I’ve been here. The carts are stopped in front of a high, whitewashed wall and the men are unloading the sugar cane that will be thrown into the drums. The boiler is spitting out a thick, red smoke that darkens the sky and suffocates us when the wind blows it our way. There is noise everywhere, great jets of steam. Directly in front of us I see a group of men feeding bagasse from the crushed cane into the furnace. They’re almost naked, like giants, sweat running down their black backs, faces grimacing against the heat of the fire. They aren’t saying anything. They’re simply scooping up the bagasse by the armful and throwing it into the furnace, grunting every time: hmph!

  I don’t know where Ferdinand is any more. I stand there, petrified, watching the cast-iron boiler, the large steel kettle bubbling like a giant’s cooking pot, and the gearwheels turning the rollers. Inside the sugar mill men are bustling about, throwing the fresh cane into the shredder’s jaws, gathering the already shredded cane to extract more juice. There is so much noise, so much heat and steam that my head is spinning. The clear juice streams over the rollers, flows towards the boiling vats. The children are standing at the foot of the centrifuges. I notice Ferdinand standing and waiting in front of the kettle that is turning slowly as the thick syrup finishes cooling off. There are large waves in the kettle and the sugar spills over on to the ground, roping down in black clots that roll through the leaves and straw covering the ground. The children rush up, shouting, gather the pieces of sugar and carry them off to one side to suck on them in the sunshine. I too am keeping an eye out in front of the vat, and when the sugar spills out, rolls on the ground, I dash forward, snatch the soft, scalding lump covered with grass and bits of bagasse. I take it outside and lick it as I squat in the dust, watching the thick, red smoke coming out of the chimney. All of the noise, the shouting children, the bustling men, fills me with a sort of fever that makes me tremble. Is it the noise from the machines and the hissing steam, is it the acrid red smoke enveloping me, the heat of the sun, the harsh taste of burned sugar? My vision grows blurry, I know I’m going to vomit. I call out to my cousin to help me, but my voice is hoarse, it rips through my throat. I call for Denis, for Laure too. But no one around me is paying any attention. The crowd of children is endlessly rushing up to the large rotating vat, waiting for the moment when – the valves having opened – the air goes whooshing into the vacuum pans and the wave of poppling syrup comes flowing down the troughs like a golden river. All of a sudden I feel so weak, so lost, that I lay my head on my knees and close my eyes.