The Prospector (11 page)

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.

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.

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.