The Prospector Read online

  Shortly before one o’clock, without having eaten, we strike out. My father is sitting up front beside the driver. Mam, Laure and I are under the tarpaulin amid the teetering chairs and the crates with the rattling remnants of the dishes. We don’t even try to peek out through the holes in the canvas to see the landscape growing gradually distant. That’s how we leave Boucan, on that Wednesday, the 31st of August, that’s how we leave our world, for we’ve never known any other, we’re losing it all, the large house where we were born, the veranda where Mam used to read us the Holy Scripture, the story of Jacob and the Angel, Moses saved from the waters, and the garden, as luxuriant as the Garden of Eden, with the trees of the Intendance, the guava and mango trees, the ravine with the leaning tamarind tree, the tall chalta tree of good and evil, the alley of stars that leads to the place in the sky where there are the most lights. We’re off now, leaving all that behind and we know that none of it will ever exist again, because it’s like death – a one-way journey.

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  ‌Forest Side

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  That’s when I began living in the company of the Mysterious Corsair, the Privateer, as my father called him. I thought about him, dreamt about him for so many years. He shared my life, my loneliness. In the cold, rainy shadows of Forest Side, then at Royal College in Curepipe, he was the one I really lived with. He was the Privateer, the man without a face or a name, who’d roamed the seas with his crew of pirates capturing Portuguese, English, Dutch ships and then one day disappeared without leaving a trace, except for these old papers, this map of an unnamed island, and a cryptogram written in cuneiform signs.

  In Forest Side, far from the sea, life did not exist. Since we’d been driven away from Boucan, we’d never gone back to the coast. Most of my school friends would spend a few days in the ‘campsites’ around Flic-en-Flac or over on the other side of the island, near Mahébourg, or as far out as Poudre d’Or. Sometimes they’d go to Deer Island and would thoroughly relate their trip afterwards, a party under the palm trees, the luncheons, the teas which were attended by lots of young girls in light-coloured dresses with parasols. We were poor, we never took trips. For that matter, Mam wouldn’t have wanted to. After the day when the hurricane passed, she hated the sea, the heat, the fevers. At Forest Side she’d been cured of that, even though an air of languor and abandon still hovered about her. Laure never left her side, never saw anyone. In the beginning she’d gone to school, like me, because she said she wanted to learn how to work so she would never have to marry. But she had to give up that idea because of Mam. Mam said she needed her at the house. We were so poor, who would help her with the housework? She had to accompany Mam to the market, cook the meals, clean. Laure didn’t say anything. She gave up going to school, but she grew despondent, taciturn, oversensitive. She would only lighten up when I came back from the College to spend Saturday night and Sunday at the house. Sometimes on Saturday she would come to meet me on Route Royale. I recognized her from a distance, her long thin silhouette wrapped neatly in her blue dress. She wore no hat and had her black hair in a long braid folded up and knotted behind. When it was drizzling, she’d come with a large shawl around her head and shoulders like an Indian woman.

  As soon as she’d catch sight of me, she’d start running towards me shouting, ‘Ali!… Ali!’ She’d hug me tight and start talking, saying all kinds of trivial things that she’d kept pent up inside all week long. Her only friends were Indian women who were poorer than she was and who lived in the hills of Forest Side, to whom she’d take a little food, some used clothing, or with whom she’d sometimes have long talks. Maybe that’s why she’d ended up resembling them somewhat, with her slender silhouette, her long black hair and those large shawls of hers.

  As for me, I would hardly listen to her, because back in those days my thoughts were exclusively occupied with the sea and the Privateer, his travels, his hideouts in Antongil, in Diego-Suarez, in Monomotapa, his expeditions, swift as the wind, out as far as the Carnatic region in India, to cut off the route of the proud and heavy vessels of the British, Dutch and French East India Companies. At the time I used to read books dealing with pirates, and their names and exploits would resound in my imagination: Avery, dubbed the ‘Little King’, who’d ravished and kidnapped the Grand Moghul’s daughter Martel, Teach, Major Stede Bonnet, who became a pirate due to a ‘disorder of mind’, Captain England, John Rackham, Roberts, Kennedy, Captain Anstis, Taylor, Davis, and the infamous Olivier Levasseur, known as La Buse, who, with the aid of Taylor, captured the viceroy of Goa and a vessel that contained a fabulous quarry of diamonds that belonged to the Golconda treasure. But the one I liked most was Misson, the pirate philosopher, who, with the aid of Cariccioli – a defrocked monk – founded the Republic of Libertalia in Diego-Suarez Bay, where all men were to live free and equal, regardless of origins or race.

  I never talked to Laure about that, because she said it was just a bunch of pipedreams like the ones that had ruined our family. But I sometimes shared my desire to go to sea and my interest in the Corsair with my father, and I was able to pore over the documents concerning the treasure, which he kept in a case lined with lead under the table that served as his desk. Every time I was at Forest Side, closed up in that long, cold and humid room in the evening, by the light of a candle, I would examine the letters, the maps and the documents that my father had made notes on and the calculations he’d made based on indications left by the Privateer. I would carefully copy the documents and the maps and take them back to the College with me to fuel my dreams.

  Years passed in that way, during which I was perhaps even more isolated than back in the days of Boucan, for life in the chill of the College and its icy halls was dreary and humiliating. There was the promiscuity of the other students, their odour, their contact, their often obscene jokes, their penchant for foul words and their obsession with sex. Until then I had heard nothing about such things and it all began when we’d been driven away from Boucan.

  There was the rainy season, not the violent storms of the coastal regions, but a fine, monotonous rain that would settle over the town and the hills for days, for weeks on end. In my spare time I’d go to the Carnegie Library and read all the books I could find in French or in English. Les Voyages et aventures en deux îles désertes by François Leguat, Le Neptune oriental by d’Après de Mannevillette, Voyages à Madagascar, à Maroc et aux Indes Orientales by l’Abbé Rochon, and also Charles Alleaume, Grenier, Ohier de Grandpré, and I’d leaf through the journals looking for illustrations, names, to nourish my dreams of the sea.

  Nights in the cold dormitory I would recite the names of the navigators who’d sailed the oceans, fleeing squadrons, pursuing myths, mirages, the elusive glitter of gold. Avery, as always, Captain Martel, Teach – known as Blackbeard – who, when asked where he’d buried his gold, answered, ‘Nobody but me and the Devil know where it be hid and the longest liver will get it all.’ That is the way Charles Johnson told it in his General History of the Pyrates. Captain Winter and his adopted son England. Howell Davis, who one day happened upon La Buse’s vessel en route and, as they had both hoisted the black flag, they decided to become allies and sail together. Cochlyn, the pirate who helped them take the Fort of Sierra Leone. Marie Read, disguised as a man, and Anne Bonny, John Rackham’s wife. Tew, who became Misson’s ally and helped found Libertalia, Cornelius, Camden, John Plantain, who became King of Rantabé, John Falemberg, Edward Johner, Daniel Darwin, Julien Hardouin, François Le Frère, Guillaume Ottroff, John Allen, William Martin, Benjamin Melly, James Butter, Guillaume Plantier, Adam Johnson.

  And all the seafarers who roamed the open seas in those days, inventing new lands. Dufouferay, Jonchée de la Goleterie, Charles Nicolas Mariette, Captain Le Meyer, who might have seen Taylor’s pirate ship Cassandra sail right past him, ‘rich to the tune of five or six million coming from China, where he had plundered those treasures’, says Charles Alleaume. Jacob de Bucquoy, who sat with Taylor as he agonized and to w
hom the pirate might have entrusted his last secret. Grenier, who was the first to explore the Chagos Archipelago, Sir Robert Farquhar, De Langle, who accompanied La Pérouse to Alaska, and still yet, the man whose name I bear, l’Étang, who countersigned for Guillaume Dufresne, commander of the Chasseur, the act establishing French rule over Mauritius on 20 September 1715. These are the names I hear in the night, eyes wide open in the dark dormitory. I also dream of the names of the ships, the loveliest names in the world, written on the stern that traces the white wake on the deep sea, written for all time into the memory that is the sea, that is the sky and the wind. The Zodiaque, the Fortuné, the Vengeur, the Victorieux that La Buse commanded, and the Galderland that he captured, Taylor’s the Défense, Surcouf’s Révenant, Camden’s Flying Dragon, the Volant that bore Pingré over to Rodrigues, the Amphitrite, and the Grande Hirondelle, commanded by the corsair Le Même, until he perished on the Fortuné. The Néréide, the Otter, the Sapphire, upon which, in September 1809, Rowley’s Englishmen came sailing right up to the Pointe des Galets to conquer the Ile de France. There were also the names of the islands, fabulous names that I knew by heart, simple islets where explorers and privateers stopped in search of water or bird’s eggs, hideouts in the crooks of bays, pirates’ lairs where they established their towns, their palaces, their states: Diego-Suarez Bay, Saint Augustine Bay, Antongil Bay in Madagascar, Ile Sainte Marie, Foulpointe, Tintingue. The Comoros Islands, Anjouan, Maheli, Mayotte. The Seychelles and the Amirantes Archipelago, Alphonse Island, Coetivi, George, Roquepiz, Aldabra, Assumption Island, Cosmoledo, Astove, St Pierre, Providence, Juan de Nova, the Chagos group: Diego Garcia, Egmont, Danger, Eagle, Three Brothers, Peros Banhos, Solomon, Legour. The Cargados Carajos, the marvellous island of Saint Brandon, where women are forbidden; Raphael, Tromelin, Sand Island, the Saya de Malha Bank, The Nazareth Bank, Agalega… Those were the names I heard in the silence of the night, names so distant and yet so familiar, and even today as I write them my heart beats faster and I’m not sure any more whether I’ve been to them or not.

  The moments of true life were when Laure and I would be reunited after being separated for a week. All along the muddy lane leading to Forest Side that ran parallel to the railway tracks as far as Eau Bleue, we’d talk, paying no attention to the people under their umbrellas, trying to recollect the days in Boucan, our adventures through the cane fields, the garden, the ravine, the sound of the wind in the she-oaks. We’d talk hastily and at times it all seemed like a dream. ‘And Mananava?’ Laure asked. I couldn’t answer her, because there was a pain deep inside me and I thought of the sleepless nights, wide-eyed in the dark, listening to Laure’s overly steady breathing, listening for the sound of the rising tide. Mananava, the dark valley where the rain was born, which we’d never dared to enter. I also thought of the sea breeze that bore the two very white tropicbirds along so slowly, like legendary spirits, and I could still hear, echoing through the valley, their grating calls like the sound of a rattle. Mananava, where Old Cook’s wife said the descendants of the black maroons lived, the ones who’d killed the masters and burned the cane fields. That was where Sengor fled to and it was there that the great Sacalavou had thrown himself from a cliff top to escape the white men who were pursuing him. And she would say that when a storm came you could hear a moan rising up from Mananava, an eternal complaint.

  Laure and I would walk along, remembering, holding hands like two sweethearts. I repeated the promise I’d made to Laure, such a long time ago: we would go to Mananava.

  How could the others have been our friends, our peers? No one in Forest Side knew of Mananava.

  We’d learned to be indifferent to the poverty we lived in during those years. Too poor to have new clothing, we didn’t know anyone, never went to birthday parties or festivities. Laure and I even took a certain pleasure in that solitude. To provide for us, my father had taken a job as an accountant in one of Uncle Ludovic’s offices on Rempart Street in Port Louis, and Laure was indignant about the fact that the same man who was most responsible for our downfall and for our having to leave Boucan was feeding us, as if out of charity.

  But we suffered less from poverty than from exile. I remember those dark afternoons in the wood-framed house at Forest Side, the damp chill of the nights, the sound of water trickling over the sheet-metal roof. There, the sea no longer existed for us. We barely caught a glimpse of it at times, when we accompanied our father to Port Louis on the train, or when we went with Mam over around Champ de Mars. Off in the distance, it was an expanse of steely sheen in the sunlight between the roofs of the docks and the crowns of the trees. But we didn’t go near it. Laure and I would turn away, preferring to burn our eyes gazing at the barren flanks of Signal Mountain.

  Back in those days Mam used to talk about Europe, about France. Even though she didn’t have any family over there, she talked about Paris as if it were a place of refuge. We would take the British-India Steam Navigation Company’s liner coming from Calcutta and go to Marseilles. First we’d go across the ocean to the Suez Canal, and Laure and I enumerated all the cities we would be able to see, Monbaz, Aden, Alexandria, Athens, Genoa. Next we’d take the train to Paris where one of our uncles lived, one of my father’s brothers, who never wrote and whom we knew by the name of Uncle Pierre, an unmarried musician, who, according to my father, had a nasty temperament but was very generous. He’s the one who sent money for our education and who came to Mam’s rescue after my father’s death. That’s what Mam had decided, we’d go live with him – at least at first – until we found lodgings. She even communicated the fever of that journey to my father and he would dream out loud about the plans. As for myself, I couldn’t forget the Corsair or his hidden gold. Would there be room for a corsair over there in Paris?

  So we were to reside in that mysterious city, where there were so many beautiful things and so many dangers as well. Laure had read the interminable serial novel The Mysteries of Paris, which related tales of bandits, child abductors, murderers. But the dangers were palliated in her eyes when she saw engravings in journals representing the Champ de Mars (the real one), the Vendôme Column, the wide boulevards, the fashions. During the long Saturday evenings we’d talk about the journey, listening to the rain drumming on the sheet-metal roof, and the sound of the gunnies’ carts rolling through the mud in the lane. Laure spoke of the places we would visit, of the circus, especially, for she’d seen drawings in my father’s journals of a huge circus tent under which tigers, lions, elephants parade, ridden by young girls wearing bayadère dresses. Mam would steer us back to more serious things: we would both study, law for me, music for Laure, we would go to the museums, maybe visit the large chateaus. We’d remain silent for long moments, having trouble imagining it all.

  But best of all, for Laure and me, was when we’d talk about the evidently distant day when we would come back home to Mauritius like aged adventurers trying to find their way back to the land of their childhood. We would arrive one day, maybe on the same liner that we’d sailed away on, and we’d walk through the town’s streets not recognizing a single thing. We’d go to a hotel somewhere in Port Louis, maybe down on the wharf, the New Oriental or else the Garden Hotel in Comedy Street. Or still yet we’d take the train, first class, and go to the Family Hotel in Curepipe, and no one would guess who we were. I’d write our names in the register:

  Mister, Miss L’Étang

  tourists.

  And we would ride out through the cane fields on horseback, going west as far as Quinze Cantons, and even farther, and we would ride down the path that winds between the peaks of Trois Mamelles, then down the road to Magenta and it would be evening when we’d reach Boucan, and there nothing would have changed. Our house would still be there, leaning a bit to one side after the passage of the hurricane, with its roof painted the colour of the sky, and the vines would have overrun the veranda. The garden would be wilder, and near the ravine there would still be the tall chalta tree of good and evil where the birds gather b
efore nightfall. We’d even go out to the edge of the forest, facing the entrance to Mananava, where night always begins and, up in the sky, as white as sea spray, there would be the two tropicbirds that would wheel slowly above us, letting out their strange rattling calls, and then disappear into the shadows.

  There would be the sea, the smell of the sea borne along on the wind, the sound of the sea and, shuddering, we would listen to its forgotten voice, saying: don’t leave again, don’t leave again…

  But the voyage to Europe never took place, because one evening in the month of November, just before the turn of the century, our father died, struck down by a heart attack. The news reached the College in the night, carried by an Indian messenger. They came to wake me in the dormitory and led me to the Principal’s office, uncustomarily lit up at that hour. I was unceremoniously informed of what had happened, yet I felt nothing but an immense emptiness. First thing in the morning I was driven to Forest Side in a carriage and when I arrived, instead of the crowd I was dreading, I saw only Laure and our aunt Adelaide, and Mam, pale and prostrate on a chair in front of the bed where my father lay, fully dressed. For me, as well as for Laure, there was something incomprehensible and disastrous about this sudden death, coming after the ruin of the house we’d been born in, something that seemed like a punishment from heaven. Mam never quite got over it.