The Prospector Read online

  Then I feel a hand stroking my hair, I hear a voice speaking to me softly in Creole: ‘Why you cry?’ Through my tears I see a tall, beautiful Indian woman draped in her gunny cloths stained with red earth. She’s standing in front of me, very straight, calm, unsmiling, and the top part of her body is immobile, because of the hoe that she’s carrying balanced on folded rags on her head. She speaks gently to me, asks me where I’m from, and now I’m walking with her on the crowded road, clinging to her dress, feeling the slow swinging of her hips. When she reaches the entrance to Boucan on the other side of the river she walks me to Capt’n Cook’s house. Then she leaves immediately, without waiting for any reward or thanks, sets off down the middle of the long lane between the rose apple trees, and I watch her walking away, so nice and straight, the hoe balancing on her head.

  I look at the large wooden house lit up in the afternoon sun, with its blue or green roof, of such a lovely colour that today I remember it as being the colour of the dawn sky. I can still feel the heat of the red earth and of the furnace on my face, I brush off the dust and bits of straw covering my clothing. When I’m near the house I can hear Mam helping Laure recite her prayers in the shade of the veranda. Her voice is so gentle, so clear, that tears spring to my eyes again and my heart starts beating very fast. I walk towards the house, barefoot over the dry, crackled earth. I go over to the water basin behind the kitchen, dip the dark water from the basin with the enamel pitcher and wash my hands, my face, my neck, my legs, my feet. The cool water quickens the burn of the scratches, the cuts from the razor-sharp cane leaves. Mosquitoes, water spiders are skimming over the surface of the water, and larvae are bobbing along the sides of the basin. I hear the soft sound of evening birds, smell the scent of smoke settling on the garden, as if it were heralding the night that is beginning in the ravines of Mananava. Then I walk over to Laure’s tree at the edge of the garden, the tall chalta tree of good and evil. It’s as if everything I’m feeling, everything I’m seeing now is eternal. I’m not aware that it will all soon disappear.

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  There’s Mam’s voice too. That’s the only thing I know about her now, the only thing I have left of her. I threw out all the yellowed photographs, the portraits, the letters, the books she used to read, so as not to dampen her voice. I want to be able to hear it for ever, like the people we love whose faces we’re no longer familiar with, her voice, the gentleness of her voice, which encompasses everything, the warmth of her hands, the smell of her hair, her dress, the light, the late afternoons when Laure and I would come out on the veranda, our hearts still skipping from having run, and lessons would begin for us. Mam speaks very softly, very slowly, and we listen, believing we can understand in that way. Laure is more intelligent than I am, Mam repeats that every day, she says she knows how to ask questions at the right time. We read, each in turn, standing in front of Mam, who’s rocking in her ebony rocker. We read and then Mam quizzes us, first on grammar, on verb conjugation, adjective and participle agreement. Then she questions us together about the meaning of what we’ve just read, about the words, the expressions. She asks questions carefully and I listen to her voice with both pleasure and misgivings, because I’m afraid of disappointing her. I’m ashamed of not catching on as rapidly as Laure, I feel as if I don’t deserve these moments of happiness, the gentleness of her voice, her fragrance, the light at the end of day that turns the house and the trees golden, that comes from her eyes and her words.

  For more than a year now Mam has been teaching us, because we no longer have any other schoolmistress. A long time ago – I can hardly remember it – there was a schoolmistress who would come out from Floréal three times a week. But with my father’s progressive financial ruin we can no longer afford that luxury. My father wanted to put us in boarding school, but Mam was against it, she said Laure and I were too young. So she’s in charge of our education every evening and sometimes in the morning. She teaches us everything we need to know: writing, grammar, some arithmetic and Bible History. In the beginning my father was doubtful about the worth of her teaching. But one day Joseph Lestang, who is headmaster at the Royal College, was astonished at the breadth of our knowledge. He even told my father that we were far ahead of other children our age, and since then my father has completely accepted Mam’s teaching.

  Still, today I wouldn’t be able to explain exactly what that teaching was. At the time we – my father, Mam, Laure and I – lived closed up in our world in the Boucan Embayment, bordered in the east by the jagged peaks of Trois Mamelles, in the north by the vast plantations, in the south by the fallow lands of Black River, and in the west by the sea. In the evenings, when the mynahs chatter in the tall trees of the garden, there is Mam’s young, gentle voice dictating a poem or reciting a prayer. What is she saying? I don’t know any more. The meaning of her words has faded away, like the cries of the birds and the rumour of the sea breeze. All that’s left is the soft, light, almost imperceptible music in the shade of the veranda blending in with the light in the leaves of the trees.

  I listen to it tirelessly. I hear her voice vibrating in unison with the song of the birds. Sometimes I watch a flight of starlings very intently, as if their trajectory through the trees, out towards their secret places in the mountains, could explain Mam’s lesson. From time to time she brings me back down to earth by slowly pronouncing my name, the way she does, so slowly that I stop breathing.

  ‘Alexis…? Alexis?’

  She and Denis are the only ones who call me by my first name. Everyone else – maybe because Laure was the first one to have the idea – calls me Ali. As for my father, he never pronounces first names, except maybe for Mam’s, as I heard him do once or twice. He was saying Anne, Anne very softly. And at the time I heard ‘Ame’, the French word for soul. Or maybe he really was saying me, in a deep, gentle voice that he used only when speaking to her. He really loved her very much.

  In those days Mam was pretty, I wouldn’t be able to say just how pretty. I hear the sound of her voice and I immediately think of the evening light under the veranda at Boucan, surrounded by reflections off the bamboo stalks, and of the clear sky traversed by small flocks of mynahs. I believe all the beauty of that moment stems from her, from her thick curly hair of a slightly reddish-brown colour that captures the slightest glimmer of light, from her blue eyes, from her still full face, so very young, from her long vigorous pianist’s hands. There is so much peace, so much simplicity in her, so much light. I stare hard at my sister Laure, sitting up very straight on her chair, wrists resting on the edge of the table, facing the arithmetic book and the white notebook that she’s holding open with the fingertips of her left hand. She’s concentrating on writing, her head slightly tilted towards her left shoulder, her thick black hair covering one side of her Indian-like face. She doesn’t look like Mam, they have nothing in common, but Laure looks at her with her black eyes, shiny as stones, and I know she feels as much admiration, as much fervour as I do. Then the evening draws out, the golden light of sunset recedes imperceptibly from the garden, drawing flights of birds along with it, bearing the cries of field workers, the rumble of ox carts on the sugar-cane roads off into the distance.

  Every evening brings a different lesson, a poem, a fairy tale, a new problem, and yet today it seems as if it was always the same lesson, uninterrupted by the burning adventures of the day, by the wanderings out as far as the seashore or by dreams at night. When did all of that exist? Mam, leaning over the table, is explaining arithmetic by placing piles of beans in front of us. ‘Three here, I take two away, and that makes two thirds. Eight here and I put five aside, that makes five eighths… Ten here, I take nine away, how much does that make?’ I’m sitting in front of her, watching her long hands with the tapered fingers I know so well – each one of them. The very strong index finger of her left hand, the middle finger, the ring finger encircled with a fine band of gold, worn with water and with time. The fingers of the right hand, larger, harder, thicker, and the ring finge
r that she is able to lift up very high when her other fingers are running over the ivory keyboard, but that will suddenly strike a high note. ‘Alexis, you’re not listening… You never listen to the arithmetic lessons. You won’t be able to get into Royal College.’ Is that what she says? No, I don’t think so, Laure is making that up, she’s always so diligent, so conscientious about making piles of beans, because it’s her way of showing her love for Mam.

  I compensate for it with dictations. It’s the moment of the afternoon I like best when, leaning over the white page of my notebook, holding the fountain pen in my hand, I wait for Mam’s voice to begin inventing the words, one by one, very slowly, as if she were giving them to us, as if she were drawing them with the inflections and syllables. There are the difficult words that she’s carefully chosen, because she makes up the texts for our dictations herself: ‘wagonette’, ‘ventilator’, ‘half-hourly’, ‘cavalcade’, ‘equipage’, ‘fjord’, ‘aplomb’, and, of course, from time to time, to make us laugh, ‘beef’, ‘brief’, ‘leaf’ and ‘lief’. I write slowly, as best I can, to draw out the time that Mam’s voice will resonate in the silence of the white page, waiting also for the moment when she’ll tell me, with a little nod of her head, as if it were the first time she’d noticed, ‘You have pretty handwriting.’

  Then she rereads the dictation, but at her own rhythm, marking a slight pause for the commas, a silence for the periods. That cannot come to an end either, it’s a long story she tells us, every evening, in which the same words, the same music is repeated, but jumbled up and arranged differently. Nights, lying on my cot under the veil of the mosquito net, just before falling asleep, listening to the familiar sounds – my father’s deep voice reading a newspaper article or conversing with Mam and Aunt Adelaide, Mam’s buoyant laughter, the distant voices of the black men sitting under the trees listening for the sound of the sea breeze in the needles of the she-oaks – that same interminable story comes back to me, full of words and sounds slowly dictated by Mam, sometimes the acute accent she pronounces a syllable with or the very long silence that makes a word grow larger, and the light in her eyes shining upon those beautiful and incomprehensible sentences. I don’t believe I go to sleep until I’ve seen that light shining, until I’ve glimpsed that sparkle. A word, just a word that I carry off with me into sleep.

  I like Mam’s moral lessons too, usually early on Sunday mornings before reciting Mass. I like the moral lessons because Mam always tells us a story, always a different one, set in places we’re familiar with. Afterwards she asks Laure and me questions. They aren’t difficult questions, but she just asks them, looking straight at us, and I can feel the very gentle blue of her gaze penetrating deep inside me.

  ‘The story takes place in a convent where there were a dozen residents, twelve little orphans just like I was when I was your age. One evening at dinner time, guess what they saw on the table? A large platter of sardines, which they were very fond of – they were poor, you see, and for them having sardines for dinner was a feast! And in that platter there were precisely as many sardines as there were little orphan girls, twelve sardines. No, no, there was an extra one – there were thirteen sardines in all. When everyone had eaten, the sister pointed to the last sardine that remained in the middle of the platter and asked, “Who will eat the last one? Does anyone among you want it?” Not a hand was raised, not one of the little girls answered. “Well then,” said the sister gaily, “here’s what we’ll do: we’ll blow out the candle and when the room is dark, whoever wants the sardine can eat it without being ashamed.” The sister put out the candle, and do you know what happened then? Each of the little girls reached out her hand in the dark to take the sardine, and her hand found another little girl’s hand. There were twelve little hands in the platter!’

  Those are the stories Mam tells, I’ve never heard better or funnier ones.

  But what I really like a lot is Bible History. It’s a big book bound in dark-red leather, an old book with a cover embossed with a golden sun and twelve rays emanating from it. Sometimes, Mam lets Laure and I look at it.

  We turn the pages very slowly to look at the illustrations, to read the words written at the top of the pages, the captions. There are engravings that I love more than anything else, like the Tower of Babel or the one that says: ‘The prophet Jonah remained three days in the belly of the whale and came out alive.’ Off in the distance, near the horizon, there is a large sailing vessel melting in with the clouds, and when I ask Mam who is in the vessel she can’t answer me. I have the feeling that one day I’ll know who was travelling in that large ship and saw Jonah when he came out of the whale’s belly. I also like it when God makes ‘armies in the air’ appear amid the clouds over Jerusalem. And the battle of Eleazar against Antiochus, where we see an enraged elephant bursting into a group of warriors. What Laure likes best is the beginning, the creation of man and woman and the picture where we see the devil in the form of a serpent with a man’s head coiled around the tree of good and evil. That’s how she knew it was the chalta tree that is at the edge of our garden, because it has the same leaves and fruit. Laure loves to go out to the tree in the evening, she climbs up on the main branches and picks the thick-skinned fruit that we’ve been forbidden to eat. She doesn’t talk about that to anyone but me.

  Mam reads us stories from the Holy Scripture, the Tower of Babel, the city with the tower reaching all the way up to the sky. Abraham’s sacrifice, or else the story of Joseph being sold by his brothers. It took place in 2876 BC, twelve years before the death of Isaac. I remember that date well. I also really like the story of Moses saved from the waters, Laure and I often ask Mam to read it to us. To prevent the Pharaoh’s soldiers from killing her child, his mother put him in a ‘little cradle of woven reeds’, the book says, ‘and she placed him in the water near the bank of the Nile’. The Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the river ‘to bathe, in the company of her many servants. As soon as she noticed the basket, she was curious to learn what was in it and sent one of her maidservants to fetch it. When she saw the infant crying in the cradle she was touched and, as the child’s beauty caused her tender feelings to grow even deeper, she resolved to save it.’ We recite the story by heart and we always stop at the place when the Pharaoh’s daughter adopts the child and names him Moses, because she’d saved him from the waters.

  There is one story that I love above all, it’s the one about the Queen of Sheba. I don’t know why I like it, but after talking about it so much I succeed in getting Laure to like it too. Mam knows this and sometimes, with a smile, she opens the big red book to that chapter and starts reading. I still know every sentence by heart, even today: ‘After Solomon had built such a magnificent temple for God, he built a palace for himself – which took fourteen years to finish – and gold glittered in every corner and the eyes of the world were turned upon the magnificence of the columns and sculptures…’ Then the Queen of Sheba appears, ‘who came from deep in the south to ascertain whether all that was said about the young prince was true. She came in magnificent circumstance and brought rich presents to Solomon, six score talents of gold’ – which would be approximately eight million pounds – ‘extremely precious pearls and perfumes the likes of which had never been seen.’ It isn’t the words I’m hearing, but Mam’s voice that is drawing me into the palace of Solomon, who has risen from his throne as the extremely lovely Queen of Sheba leads in the slaves rolling treasures across the floor. Laure and I really like King Solomon, even if we don’t understand why he forsook the Lord and worshipped the idols at the end of his life. Mam says that’s just the way it is, even the most righteous and powerful men can commit sins. We don’t understand how that can be possible, but we like the way he rendered his judgements and that magnificent palace he had built that the Queen of Sheba came to visit. But maybe what we really like is the book with its red-leather cover and the large golden sun, and Mam’s slow, gentle voice, her blue eyes glancing up at us between each sentence, and the sunli
ght lying ever so golden upon the trees in the garden, for I’ve never read any other book that made such a deep impression upon me.

  On afternoons when Mam’s lessons finish a little early, Laure and I go exploring in the attic of the house. There is a little wooden stairway that leads up to the ceiling and you just need to push open a trapdoor. Under the shingled rooftops it is dusky and the heat is stifling, but we love being up there. At each end of the attic there is a narrow garret window, with no panes, simply closed with poorly joined shutters. When you crack open the shutters, you can see way out over the landscape as far as the cane fields of Yemen and Magenta, and the peaks of Trois Mamelles and Rempart Mountain.

  I love staying up here in this secret place until dinner time and even later, after nightfall. My hiding place is the part of the attic that’s all the way at the end of the roof, on the side where you can see the mountains. There’s a lot of dusty, termite-eaten furniture – all that is left of what my great-grandfather had bought from the East India Company. I sit down on a very low seamstress chair and look out through the garret window towards the mountains jutting up from the shadows. In the middle of the attic there are large trunks filled with old papers, French reviews in bundles tied up with string. That’s where my father has put all of his old journals. Every six or seven months he makes a packet that he puts on the floor near the trunks. Laure and I often come up here to look at the pictures. We’re lying in the dust on our stomachs with stacks of old journals in front of us and turning the pages very slowly. There is the Journal des Voyages that always has a drawing on the front page representing some extraordinary scene, a tiger hunt in India or the attack of the Zulus against the English or still yet the Comanches making an attack on the railroad in America. Inside, Laure reads passages from Les Robinsons marseillais, a serial she’s fond of. The journal we like best of all is the Illustrated London News and, since I don’t understand English very well, I look more closely at the illustrations to guess what the text says. Laure has already started to learn English with my father and she explains what it’s about, the way to pronounce the words. We don’t stay very long because the dust soon makes us start sneezing and stings our eyes. Sometimes though, we stay for hours, on Sunday afternoons when it’s too hot outside or when a fever is keeping us in the house.