The Prospector (2 page)

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.

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 ‘
Am
e
', 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.'