The Prospector (7 page)

I remember going into his office then, almost holding my breath, looking at the books and journals piled up on the floor, the maps tacked to the walls. The map I prefer is the one with the constellations that he's already shown me to teach me astronomy. Whenever we go into the office we read the names of the stars and their formations in the night sky in awe: Sagittarius, led by the star named Nunki, Lupus, Aquila, Orion. Boötes, with Alphecca in the east, Arcturus in the west. Scorpius with threatening lines, with Shaula at the end of its tail like a luminous stinger and the red Antares in its head. The Greater Bear and each of the stars along its curve, Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Dubhe, Merak, Auriga, whose main star – Menkalinan – rings oddly in my mind.

I remember the Greater Dog that has the lovely Sirius in its mouth – like a fang – and down below it a triangle in which Adhara pulses. I can still see one perfect drawing, the one I love most, that I look for, night after night, in the summer sky over in the direction of Le Morne: that of the vessel Argo, which I sometimes draw in the dust on the paths like this:

My father is standing up, he's talking and I don't understand what he's saying very well. He's not really talking to me, the child with the too-long hair, the sun-browned face, the torn clothing from running through the underbrush and the cane fields. He's talking to himself, his eyes are bright, his voice a bit husky with excitement. He's talking about the immense treasure he's going to discover, for he knows at last where it's hidden, he's discovered the island upon which the Corsair stowed his hoard. He doesn't say the Corsair's name, but just – as I will later read in his documents – the Mysterious Corsair, and even today that name still seems to me to be more real and filled with more magic than any other. He's talking to me for the first time about Rodrigues Island, a dependency of Mauritius, that takes several days to reach by boat. Tacked to the wall of his office is a map of the island covered with signs and landmarks that he's copied in India ink and painted in watercolour. At the bottom of the map I recall reading these words:
Rodrigues Island
, and under that
Admiralty
Chart, Wharton 1876
. I'm listening to my father without hearing him, as if from deep in a dream. The legend of the treasure, the research that's been done over the last hundred years on Amber Island, in Flic-en-Flac, in the Seychelles. Maybe it's the feeling of being overwhelmed or the anxiety that's keeping me from understanding, because I can tell it's the most important thing in the world, a secret that can at any moment mean our salvation or our downfall. Now there's no more talk of electricity or any other project. The light of the Rodrigues treasure is dazzling me and dulling all others. My father talks for a long time that afternoon, pacing around the narrow room, picking up papers and looking at them, then laying them back down without even showing me, while I remain standing still near his table, looking furtively at the map of Rodrigues Island stuck on the wall next to the map of the night sky. Maybe that's why, later, I will always feel as if everything that happened after that, the adventure, the quest, took place in ethereal lands, not down on the real earth, as if my journey aboard the Argo had already begun.

These are the last days of summer and they seem very long, filled with so many events at all times of the day or night: they're more like months or years, deeply changing the world around us and leaving us aged. Heatwave days when the air is dense, heavy and liquid down in the Tamarin Valley and one feels a prisoner of the circus of mountains. Beyond, the sky is clear, restless, the clouds scud along in the wind, their shadows hurrying over the burned hills. The last of the harvesting will soon be over and there are angry rumblings among the field labourers because they have nothing left to eat. Sometimes in the evening I see the red smoke of fires in the cane fields, then the sky turns a strange colour, a glaring, ominous red that hurts your eyes and makes your throat tighten. In spite of the danger I walk through the fields almost every day to see the fires. I go out as far as Yemen, sometimes as far as Tamarin Estate, or make my way up towards Magenta and Belle Rive. From high up on the Tourelle I see other clouds of smoke rising in the north over by Clarence or Marcenay on the outskirts of Wolmar. Now I'm alone. Ever since the journey in the pirogue my father has forbidden me to see Denis. He doesn't come to Boucan any more. Laure says she heard Denis's grandfather, Capt'n Cook, shouting at him, because Denis came to see him in spite of the restriction. Since then he's disappeared. It has made me feel as if there is an emptiness, a great solitude here, as if my parents, Laure and I are Boucan's last inhabitants.

So I wander out very far, farther and farther. I climb to the top of the high Creole walls and search for the smoke of the revolts. I run through the fields, devastated from the harvests. There are still labourers in places, very poor, old women dressed in gunny cloth, gleaning or cutting the couch grass with their sickles. When they see me, my face tanned and clothes stained with red earth, barefoot and carrying my shoes slung around my neck, they shout at me to drive me away, because they're afraid. No white person ever comes out this far. Sometimes the sirdars also insult me and throw stones and I run through the cane until I'm out of breath. I hate the sirdars. I despise them more than anything in the world, because they are unfeeling and cruel, and because they beat the poor people with sticks when the bundles of cane don't reach the cart fast enough. But in the evening they get paid double and then get drunk on arak. They're cowardly and obsequious with the field managers, they take off their caps when they speak to them and feign being fond of the people they've just mistreated. There are men in the fields who are almost naked, covered only with a tattered piece of cloth, pulling out the cane stubble with heavy iron pincers that are called ‘
macchabée
s
'. They carry blocks of basalt over to the ox cart on their shoulders, then go and pile them up at the end of the field, making new pyramids. They are the people Mam calls ‘the martyrs of the cane'. They sing as they work and I really like hearing their monotone voices in the lonely expanse of the plantations as I'm sitting up on top of a black pyramid. Just for myself I like to sing the old Creole song Capt'n Cook used to sing to Laure and me when we were very small, the one that goes:

Mo passé la rivière Tanier

Rencontré en' grand maman,

Mo dire li qui li faire là

Li dire mo mo la pes cabot

Waï, waï mo zenfant

Faut travaï pou gagn' son pain

Waï, waï mo zenfant

Faut travaï pou gagn' son pain…

Mi guh dung a Tanier riva

Mi si a ole grandmada

Mi ax har weh shi a do deh

She tell me seh shi a fish mullet

Yeh, yeh mi pickney

Haffi wuk fi get yuh bread

Yeh, yeh mi pickney

Haffi wuk fi get yuh bread…

I see the smoke from fires over by Yemen and Walhalla, from up there on the heap of stones. On this particular morning they're very close, right next to the shacks of Tamarin River, and I realize something bad is happening. Heart racing, I rush down through the fields until I reach the dirt road. The blue roof of our house is too far away for me to warn Laure about what's going on. I can already hear the sounds of the riot when I reach the Boucan ford. It's a rumbling sound like that of a storm that seems to be coming from all sides at once, that is echoing through the mountain gorges. There are shouts, grumbling, shots too. In spite of my fear I run through the middle of the cane field, without taking care to avoid being cut. When I come up in front of the sugar mill, the noise is all around me, I see the riot. The mob of gunnies is thronging around the door, all of the voices shouting at once. Facing the crowd are three men on horseback and I can hear the sound of their hooves on the cobblestones when they rear their steeds. Behind them I can see the gaping mouth of the furnace, where sparks are whirling.

The mass of labourers moves forwards, then back again in a strange sort of dance while the shouting rises and falls in strident modulation. Men brandish cane knives, scythes, and the women hoes and billhooks. Panic-stricken, I stand frozen to the spot, while the crowd jostles around me, encircles me. I'm suffocating, I'm blinded by the dust. With great difficulty I make my way over to the wall of the sugar mill. Just then, without my understanding what is happening, I see the three horsemen start to gallop towards the throng that closes in around them. The withers of the horses are pushing the men and women back and the riders are striking out with their rifle butts. Two horses escape in the direction of the cane fields, pursued by the angry cries of the crowd. They pass so close to me I throw myself to the ground in the dust for fear of being trampled. Then I glimpse the third rider. He's fallen from his horse and the men and women have grabbed him by the arms, are shoving him around. I recognize his face, despite it being twisted with fear. He's a relative of Ferdinand's – a man named Dumont, the husband of one of his cousins – who is a field manager on Uncle Ludovic's plantations. My father says he's worse than a sirdar, that he beats the workers with sticks and if they complain about him he steals their pay. Now it's the field labourers who are mauling him, hitting him, insulting him, making him fall to the ground. For a moment, in the midst of the crowd that is shoving him around, he's so close to me that I can see the wild look in his eyes, can hear the hoarse sound of his breathing. I'm afraid, because I realize he's going to die. Nausea rises in my throat, strangles me. My eyes fill with tears, I strike out with my fists at the angry crowd that doesn't even see me. The men and women in gunny cloth pursue their strange dance, their shouts. When I'm able to get out of the crowd I turn around and see the white man. His clothing is torn to pieces and he is being carried, half-naked, at arm's length above the crowd over to the bagasse furnace. The man isn't screaming, isn't moving. His face is a white blotch of fear as the black people lift him up by the arms and legs and begin to swing him in front of the red door of the furnace. I stand there, petrified, alone in the middle of the dirt road, listening to the voices shouting louder and louder, and now it is like a slow and painful chant punctuating the swinging of the body over the flames. Then there is one movement of the crowd and a great wild cry when the man disappears into the furnace. Then the clamour suddenly ceases and I can once again hear the dull roaring of the flames, the gurgling of cane juice in the large shiny kettles. I can't tear my eyes away from the flaming mouth of the bagasse furnace into which the black men are now shovelling dried cane as if nothing has happened. Then, slowly, the crowd breaks up. The women in gunny cloth walk through the dust, veiling their faces with their head rags. The men wander off towards the paths in the cane fields, knives in hand. There are no more clamours or noises, only the silence of the wind in the cane leaves as I walk towards the river. The silence is within me, is brimming up inside me making my head spin, and I know I'll never be able to talk to anyone about what I've seen today.

Sometimes Laure comes out into the fields with me. We walk down the paths through the cut cane and when the earth is too loose or when there are piles of harvested cane stalks I carry her on my back, so she won't ruin her dress and her ankle boots. Though she's a year older than I am, Laure is so light and fragile it feels as though I'm carrying a small child. She really likes it when we walk like that and the sharp-edged cane leaves open before her face and close behind her. One day in the attic she showed me an old edition of the
Illustrated London News
with an image depicting Naomi being carried on Ali's shoulders through the barley fields. Naomi is laughing gaily, tearing off the heads of barley that are whipping at her face. She tells me it's because of that picture that she calls me Ali. Laure also talks to me about Paul and Virginie, but I don't like that story, because Virginie was so afraid to undress before going into the water. I think that's ridiculous and I tell Laure it's surely not a true story, but that makes her angry. She says I just don't get it at all.

We walk over around the hills where the Magenta Estate and the rich people's ‘
chassés
' begin. But Laure doesn't want to enter the forest. So we go back down towards the source of the Boucan. Up in the hills the air is humid, as if the morning mists are still caught in the leaves of the bushes. Laure and I really like sitting down in a clearing when the trees are barely emerging from the night shadows and watching for the seabirds to pass. Sometimes we see a couple of tropicbirds. The beautiful white birds come out of the Black River Gorges – over by Mananava – and they glide leisurely above our heads, wings spread like crosses of sea foam, their long tails trailing out behind. Laure says they are the souls of sailors who've died at sea and of the women who await their return in vain. They are silent, graceful. They live in Mananava, where the mountains are dark and the sky is clouded over. We believe it's the place where the rain is born.