The Prospector (12 page)

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 whom 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 before 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.

The first consequence of my father's death was even greater impoverishment, especially for Mam. Europe was now completely out of the question. We were prisoners on our island, with no hope of escaping. I began to hate that cold, rainy town, the roads crowded with the poor, the carts endlessly carrying loads of cane to the sugar train, and even the things I'd so loved in the past, those immense expanses of cane with the waves of wind running over them. Would I be forced to work one day as a gunny, load the sheaves of cane on to the ox carts, and then pitch them into the mouth of the mill every day of my life, with no hope, no freedom? That wasn't what came to be, but what did was perhaps even worse. My grant for the College having expired, I had to go to work, and it was in the post my father had occupied in the dreary offices of W. W. West, the export and insurance company controlled by my powerful uncle Ludovic.

So then I felt as if I were breaking the ties that bound me to Laure and to Mam, but more than anything else as if Boucan and Mananava were disappearing for ever.

Rempart Street was another world. I arrived every morning with the swarm of errand boys and Chinese and Indian merchants coming to do business. The important people, businessmen, lawyers, wearing dark suits, carrying their hats and canes came streaming from the first-class coaches. I was caught up in the flow of that crowd and swept over to the door of the offices of W. W. West, where the registers and piles of bills were awaiting me in the sultry half-light. I remained there until five o'clock in the evening, with a half-hour lunch break at noon. My colleagues went to eat at a Chinese place in Rue Royale, but to save money – and also because of my fondness for solitude – I would simply nibble on a few hot pepper cakes in front of the Chinese store, and sometimes, as a special treat, an orange from South Africa that I'd cut into sections, sitting on a low wall in the shade of a tree and watching the Indian peasants coming back from the market.

It was a routine life, with no surprises. And I often felt as if none of it was real, as if I was having a waking dream – all of it – the train, the figures in the registers, the smell of dust in the offices, the voices of the W. W. West employees who spoke in English and those Indian women walking slowly along the immense streets in the sunshine on their way back from the market carrying empty baskets on their heads.

But there were the boats. I would go down to the port to see them whenever I could, whenever I had an hour before the W. W. West offices opened, or after five o'clock, when Rempart Street was empty. On holidays, when other young men went strolling down the walkways of Champ de Mars with their fiancées on their arms, I preferred to hang around the wharves, surrounded by ropes and fishing nets, listening to the fishermen and watching the boats rocking on the heavy water, trying to follow the tracery of the riggings with my eyes. I was already dreaming of going away, but I had to make do with reading the names of the boats on the sterns. At times they were simply fishing barks bearing only a rudimentary drawing of a peacock, a rooster or a dolphin. I'd stare intently at the sailor's faces, old Indians, black men, turbaned Comorians, sitting in the shade of tall trees, barely moving, smoking their cigars.

Today I can still recall the names I used to read on the sterns of the ships. They're etched into my mind like the words of a song:
Gladys
,
Essalaam
,
Star of the Indian Sea
,
L'Amitié
,
Rose Belle
,
Kumuda
,
Rupanika
,
Tan Rouge
,
Rosalie
,
Poudre d'Or
,
Belle of the South
. To me they were the most beautiful names in the world, because they spoke of the sea, they told of the long waves out on the open seas, the coral reefs, the distant archipelagos, even the storms. When I read them I would suddenly be far from land, far from the city streets, and especially far from the dusty gloom of the offices and the registers filled with figures.