The Prospector E-Book

J. M. G. Le Clézio

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 551

Beschreibung

***J. M. G. Le Clézio is the Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Fiction*** On the isle of Mauritius at the turn of the century the young Alexis L'Etang enjoys an idyllic existence with his parents and beloved sister - sampling the pleasures of privilege, exploring the onstellations and tropical flora, and dreaming of treasure buried long ago by the Unknown Corsair. But with his father's death, Alexis must leave his childhood paradise and enter the harsh world of privation and shame. Years later, Alexis has become obsessed with the idea of finding the Corsair's treasure; and through it, the lost magic and opulence of his youth. He abandons job and family, setting off on a quest that will take him from the remote tropical islands to the hell of the First World War, and from a love affair with the mysterious Ouma to a momentous confrontation with the search that has consumed his life. By turns harsh and lyrical, pointed and nostalgic, The Prospector is a 'parable of the human condition' (Le Monde) by one of the most significant literary figures in Europe today.

Leseprobe

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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 fields 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.

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 Âme, 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 finger 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 sunlight 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.

In the reviews that aren’t illustrated I look at the advertisements, the ones for the Parisian Dry Cleaners, for the A. Fleury & A. Toulorge Pharmacy, the Coringhy Tobacconist, blue-black sumac ink, American pocket watches, the beautiful bicycles that we dream of having. Laure and I play at buying things and we get our ideas from the advertisements. Laure would like a bicycle, a real bicycle painted in black enamel with large wheels fitted with pneumatics and chrome handlebars like the ones we see when we go over to Champ de Mars or Port Louis. As for me, there are several things I would like to have, like the large drawing pads, the paints and the compasses from Magasin Wimphen, or the pocket knives with twelve blades from the gunsmiths’. But there’s nothing I want more than the Favre-Leuba fob watch imported from Geneva. I always see it in the same place in the journals, on the next-to-last page, with the needles showing the same time and the second hand at twelve. I always read with the same delight the words of the advertisement describing it: ‘unbreakable’, ‘waterproof’, ‘airtight’, ‘made of stainless steel’, ‘enamel face’, ‘amazing precision’, ‘sturdiness’, ‘ready to serve you for a lifetime’.

That’s what we dream about up in our hiding place under the sun-baked rooftops. There’s also the landscape, as I see it through the garret window, the only landscape I know and love, the one these eyes will never see again: out beyond the dark trees of the garden, the green stretch of the cane fields, the grey-and-blue patches of the aloes over by Walhalla, by Yemen, the smoking sugar-mill chimneys and, off in the distance, like a huge semicircular wall, the flamboyant red mountain range where the peaks of Trois Mamelles tower. The tips of the volcanoes standing against the sky are like needles, gracile, like the towers of a fairy castle. I gaze at them tirelessly through the narrow window, as if I were the lookout on a beached, motionless ship, watching for some kind of sign. Listening to the sound of the sea deep within me, behind me, borne along on the tide winds. And I truly am in a ship as the joists and struts of the roof timbers crack, floating eternally before the mountains. This is where I heard the sea for the very first time, this is where I can feel it best, when the tide rises, bringing in its long waves that force their way through the pass facing the estuary of the two rivers, casting spurts of sea foam high over the barrier reefs.

Back in the days of Boucan we never see anyone. Laure and I grow to be downright unsociable. Whenever we can, we escape from the garden and go walking through the cane, towards the sea. It’s grown hot, a dry, ‘stinging’ heat as Capt’n Cook says. Are we even aware that we have such freedom? We don’t even know the meaning of the word. We never leave the Boucan Embayment, the imaginary property bordered by the two rivers, the mountains and the sea.

Now that the long holidays have begun, my cousin Ferdinand comes over more often, when Uncle Ludovic goes down to his lands in Barefoot and Yemen. Ferdinand doesn’t like me. One day he called me ‘the Wild Woodsman’, as his father had, and he also said something about Friday, because of Denis. He said ‘all tar’, black skin and soul to boot, and I got mad. Even though he’s two years older than I am, I jumped on him and tried to get his neck in an armlock, but he quickly got the better of me and then he squeezed my neck under his arm until I could feel the bones cracking and my eyes filled with tears. He never came back to Boucan after that day. I hate him and I also hate his father, Uncle Ludovic, because he’s tall and strong and he talks loudly and he always looks at us with those ironic, black eyes of his and that slightly tense sort of smile. The last time he came to our house my father wasn’t in and Mam didn’t want to see him. She had us tell him that she had a fever, she needed to rest. Uncle Ludovic sat down in the dining room anyway, on one of our old chairs that creaked under his weight, and he tried to talk to Laure and me. I remember him leaning over towards Laure and saying, ‘What’s your name?’ His black eyes gleamed when he looked at me too. Laure was all white, sitting up very straight on her chair and she was staring straight ahead without answering. She sat there like that for a long time, very still, staring ahead, while Uncle Ludovic said teasingly, ‘What? Have you lost your tongue?’ Anger was making my heart beat very fast and I finally said, ‘My sister doesn’t want to answer you.’ So then he stood up without saying anything more, he took his hat and cane and walked out. I listened to the sound of his footsteps on the steps of the veranda, then on the hard earth of the lane, and then we heard the sound of his coach, the jingling of the harness and the rumbling of the wheels, and we felt quite relieved. He never came back to our house.

At the time we thought it was some sort of victory. But Laure and I never talked about it and no one knew what had happened that afternoon. We hardly saw Ferdinand in the following years. As a matter of fact it was probably that very year, the year of the cyclone, that his father put him in boarding school at the Royal College. We had no idea that everything was going to change, that we were living our last days in the Boucan Embayment.

It was around that same time that Laure and I realized something was not right with my father’s affairs. He didn’t speak to anyone about it, I don’t believe, not even to Mam, so as not to worry her. Yet we could sense what was happening perfectly well, we could guess. One day as we’re lying up in the attic as usual, in front of the bundles of old reviews, Laure says, ‘Bankruptcy. What does bankruptcy mean?’

She’s not asking me the question, since she knows very well I have no idea. It’s simply a word that is there, that she heard, that’s echoing in her mind. A little later she repeats other words that are also frightening: mortgage, seizure, time draft. A large paper lying on my father’s desk, which I hastily read, is laden with minute figures like fly specks. Two mysterious English words stand out: assets and liabilities. What does that mean? Laure doesn’t know the meaning of these words either and she doesn’t dare ask our father. They are menacing words, they hold a danger that we don’t understand, like those series of underlined, crossed-out figures, some written in red.

Several times I awaken to the sound of voices, late at night. With my damp, sweaty nightshirt sticking to my skin, I creep down the hallway to the dining-room door. Through the open crack I can hear my father’s deep voice, then other voices of strangers answering him. What are they talking about? Even if I listened to every word, I wouldn’t be able to understand. But I’m not listening to the words. I hear only the gabbling of the voices, the glasses clunking down on the table, the feet scuffing over the floorboards, the chairs creaking. Maybe Mam is there too, sitting beside my father as she does at mealtimes? But the strong smell of tobacco enlightens me. Mam doesn’t like cigar smoke, she must be in her bedroom, lying in her brass bed, also staring at the line of yellow light under the half-open door, listening to the strangers’ voices, just as I am, crouching here in the dark corridor, while my father talks on and on for such a long time… Later I go back to the bedroom, slip under the mosquito netting. Laure doesn’t budge, I know she isn’t sleeping, that her eyes are wide open in the dark and that she’s also listening to the voices at the other end of the house. Stretched out on my cot with canvas webbing, I wait, holding my breath, until I hear footsteps in the garden, the axles of the coach squeaking as it drives away. I wait even longer, until I can hear the sound of the sea, the invisible tide of night, when the wind whistles in the needles of the she-oaks and bangs the shutters, and the roof timbers groan like the hull of an old boat. Then I can drift off to sleep.

Denis’s lessons are the most beautiful. He teaches me the sky, the sea, the caves at the foot of the mountains, the fallow fields where we run together that summer, between the black pyramids of Creole dead work. Sometimes we leave at the crack of dawn when the mountaintops are still caught in the mists, and the low tide in the distance is uncovering the reefs. We go through the fields of aloes along silent, narrow paths. Denis walks out in front, I can see his tall, slim, supple silhouette moving along as if he were dancing. Here he doesn’t bark like he does in the cane fields. From time to time he stops. He looks like a dog that has caught scent of a wild animal, a rabbit, a tenrec. When he stops, he raises his right hand slightly, as a signal, and I stop too, listening. I listen to the sound of the wind in the aloes, as well as the sound of my heart. The first rays of dawn are shining on the red earth, lighting the dark leaves. The mist is tearing on the peaks of the mountains, now the sky is intense. I imagine the sea, azure-coloured out around the coral reef but still black at the mouth of the rivers. ‘Look!’ Denis says. He’s standing still on the path and is pointing at the mountain over by Black River Gorges. I see a bird very high in the sky, gliding along on the air currents, head turned slightly to one side, its long white tail floating out behind. ‘Tropicbird,’ says Denis. It’s the first time I’ve seen one. It circles slowly over the ravines, then disappears in the direction of Mananava.

Denis has started walking again. We’re following the narrow valley of the Boucan, up towards the mountains. We walk over old cane fields that are now uncultivated, where nothing remains but short low walls of lava stone hidden under the bramble bushes. I’m no longer in my territory. I’m on foreign terrain, that of Denis and the black people on the other side, the people from Chamarel, from Black River, from Case Noyale. As Denis goes further away from Boucan and makes his way up towards the forest, towards the mountains, he grows gradually less wary, talks more, seems more relaxed. He’s walking slowly now, his gestures are more casual, his face even lights up, he waits for me on the trail, smiling. He points to the mountains near us on the right. ‘Le Grand Louis, Mont Terre Rouge.’ We’re surrounded by silence, the wind has fallen, I can’t smell the sea any more. The underbrush is so dense we have to walk in the bed of a torrent. I’ve taken off my shoes, tied the laces together and slung them around my neck, as I usually do when I’m out with Denis. We’re walking in a trickle of cold water that runs over the sharp rocks. Denis stops in the bends, scans the water in search of camarons, of crayfish.

The sun is high in the sky when we reach the source of the Boucan high in the mountains. The January heat is oppressive, I find it hard to breathe under the trees. Striped mosquitoes come out of their nesting places and dance in front of my eyes, I can see them dancing around Denis’s woolly hair too. On the banks of the torrent, Denis takes off his shirt and begins to gather leaves. I draw nearer to look at the dark-green leaves covered with fine grey down that he’s harvesting in the shirt, now converted into a sack. ‘Dasheen,’ Denis says. He splashes a little water into one of the curved leafs and holds it out to me. Caught in the fine down, the drop remains suspended, like a liquid diamond. Further on, he gathers other leaves: ‘Dasheen wrap’. On the trunk of a tree he points to a vine: ‘Mile-a-minute vine’. Palmate leaves open out in a heart shape: ‘Faham tea’. I knew that Old Sara, Capt’n Cook’s sister was a ‘yangue’ – that she made potions and cast spells – but this is the first time Denis has taken me to look for plants for her. Sara is Malagasy, she came from Grand Terre with Cook, Denis’s grandfather, back in the slave days. One day Cook told Laure and me that he’d been so frightened when he arrived in Port Louis with the other slaves that he’d gone and sat up in a tree at the Intendance and refused to come down again, because he believed they were going to eat him, right there on the wharves. Sara lives in Black River. She used to come and visit her brother and she liked Laure and me a lot. Now she’s too old.

Denis continues to walk along the torrent towards its source. The thin trickle of water runs black, smooth over the basalt rocks. The heat is so muggy Denis splashes his face and chest with water from the stream and tells me to do the same to freshen myself up. I drink some cool, light water right from the stream. Denis is still walking out ahead, along the narrow ravine. He’s carrying the bundle of leaves on his head. He stops at times, motions to a tree in the thick of the forest, a plant, a vine, ‘Benzoin’, ‘hart’s-tongue fern’, ‘Indian laurel’, ‘tall balm’, ‘mamsell tree’, ‘prine’, ‘glorybower’, ‘tambourissa’.

He picks a creeping plant with long, fine leaves and crushes it between his thumb and forefinger in order to smell it: ‘verbena’. Still further along, he walks through the underbrush until he reaches a tall tree with a brown trunk. He removes a bit of bark, makes a cut with a flint: golden sap runs out. Denis says ‘balltree’. I walk behind him through the brush, bent forward, avoiding the thorny branches. Denis moves agilely through the forest, in silence, senses on the alert. Under my bare feet the ground is wet and warm. I’m afraid, yet I want to go further, penetrate deep into the forest. Denis stops in front of a very straight tree trunk. He tears off a piece of bark and has me smell it. It’s a smell that makes me dizzy: ‘rosin’.

We walk on, Denis is moving faster now, as if recognizing an invisible path. I’m suffocating in the heat and humidity of the forest, I’m having trouble catching my breath. I see Denis stopped in front of a bush: ‘coromandel’. In his hand a long, half-opened pod from which black seeds like insects spill. I taste a seed, it’s bitter, oily, but it gives me strength. Denis says, ‘This food for maroons with the great Sacalavou.’ It’s the first time he’s talked to me about Sacalavou. My father told us once that he died here, at the foot of the mountains, when the white people caught him. He threw himself off a cliff rather than return to captivity. It makes me feel strange, eating what he ate, here in this forest with Denis. We’re far from the stream now, already at the foot of Mont Terre Rouge. The earth is dry, the sun is burning down through the sparse acacia leaves.

‘Ironwood,’ says Denis. ‘Blackcurrant.’

Suddenly he stops. He’s found what he’s been looking for. He goes straight to the tree standing alone amid the underbrush. It’s a handsome, dark tree with low, spreading branches that have thick green leaves with copper reflections. Denis is squatting at the foot of the tree, hidden in the shadows. When I come over he doesn’t look at me. He’s laid his bundle on the ground.

‘What is it?’

Denis doesn’t answer right away. He’s searching his pockets.

‘Affouche,’ he says.