The Prospector (25 page)

Ouma brings me food, strange dishes wrapped in bitter melon leaves, rice and dried octopus cakes, manioc, hot pepper cakes. She sets down the food on a flat stone at the entrance to my camp, like an offering. I tell her of my discoveries and it makes her laugh. In a notebook I've drawn the signs I've found as the days go by. She likes me to read them to her out loud: stones marked with a heart, with two round punch marks, with a crescent moon. Stone marked with the letter M in keeping with the Key of Solomon, stone marked with a cross. The head of a serpent, the head of a woman, three round indentation marks forming a triangle. Stone marked with a chair or a ‘Z', evoking the Corsair's message. Truncated boulder. Boulder sculpted into a roof. Stone embellished with a large circle. Stone whose shadow represents a dog. Stone marked with an ‘S' and two round punch marks. Stone marked with a ‘Turkish dog' (crawling, with tips of paws missing). Boulders with a row of round punch marks indicating south-south-west. Broken and burned boulder.

Ouma also wants to see the signs I've brought back, lava in strange shapes, obsidian, stones with embedded fossils. Ouma takes them in her hands and looks at them carefully as if they were magic. Sometimes she brings me strange objects that she's found. One day she brings me a smooth, heavy stone the colour of iron. It's a meteorite and my hands coming in contact with that object fallen from the sky perhaps thousands of years ago gives me a thrill like a secret.

Now Ouma comes to English Bay almost every day. She waits in the shade of a tree, high up in the valley while I measure the distances and also when I dig probe holes, because she's afraid the noise might attract people in the vicinity. Several times young Fritz and farmer Begué come out to see me and help me dig holes near the estuary of the river. On those days Ouma doesn't show herself, but I know she's somewhere nearby, hiding behind the trees, in some nook where the colour of her skin blends in with the surroundings.

Fritz and I place the markers. They are reeds I've prepared for this very purpose which must be planted every hundred paces to trace straight lines. So I go up to the top of the valley, up among the signs I've recognized, stones engraved with punch marks, marked angles, piles of rocks forming a triangle, etc., and I plot the extension of the straight lines using the theodolite, in order to transcribe them upon the initial diagram (the Corsair's grid). The sun is beating down, making the black stones sparkle. Every now and again I shout to young Fritz to come and join me and he plants a new marker at my feet. Squinting my eyes, I can see all the lines meeting on the bed of the Roseaux River, and the knots – where I will be able to dig probe holes – appear.

Later Fritz and I dig holes near the hill in the west, at the foot of the Commander's Garret. The earth is hard and dry and our picks strike basaltic rock immediately. Every time I begin a new probe hole I'm filled with impatience. Will we finally find a sign, a trace of the Corsair's passage, perhaps the beginning of the ‘stone work'? One evening, in the guise of a treasure, as Fritz and I are digging in the sandy soil at the foot of the hill, I suddenly feel, rolling under my pick, a light ball that – in my folly – I take for the skull of some seafarer buried there. The object rolls over the sand and suddenly unfolds its legs and claws! It's a large land crab that I've surprised in its sleep. Young Fritz, swifter than I, clubs it with his shovel. He gleefully stops his work to go fetch some water in the stewpot and, having lit a fire, he prepares a court bouillon with the crab!

In the evening, when the light wanes and the valley is silent and calm, I know that Ouma is near. I can feel her observing me from high up in the hills. At times I call out to her, I shout and listen to the echo repeating her name deep into the valley: ‘Ou-ma-a!'

Her gaze is at once near and distant like that of a gliding bird whose shadow we don't notice until it makes the sun blink out. Even if I go for long periods without seeing her, because of Fritz Castel or Begué (for no Manaf woman ever shows herself to the inhabitants of the coast), I love feeling her gaze upon me, upon the valley.

Perhaps all of this belongs to her and she and her people are the true masters of this valley. Does she even believe in the treasure I'm searching for? Sometimes, when the daylight is still uncertain, I think I see her walking among the blocks of lava in the company of Sri, and stooping to examine the stones, as if she were following an invisible trail.

Or else she walks along the river down to the estuary, on to the beach where the sea is unfurling. Standing before the transparent water, she gazes out to the horizon, out beyond the coral reef. I walk up to her, contemplate the sea as well. Her face is tense, almost sad.

‘What are you thinking about, Ouma?'

She starts, turns her face towards me and her eyes are filled with sadness.

‘I'm not thinking about anything, I only think about impossible things,' she says.

‘What's impossible?'

But she doesn't answer. Then the sunlight appears, throwing everything into sharp contrast. Ouma is standing still in the cold wind with the river water running between her feet, pushing back the lip of the wave. Ouma shakes her head as if she wanted to drive away something uncomfortable, she takes my hand and pulls me over towards the sea.

‘Come on, let's go octopus-fishing.'

She takes up the long harpoon that she'd thrust into the dune among the other reeds. We walk eastwards, heading for the coast that is still in the shadows. The bed of the Roseaux River bends behind the dunes and reappears very close to the black cliff. There are tufts of reeds all the way down to the waterline. When we walk through them, swarms of tiny, silver-coloured birds suddenly flush, twittering: ‘weeet! weeet!'

‘This is where the octopuses come, the water is warmer.'

She walks over near the reeds, then suddenly takes off her shirt and skirt. Her long, slender body shines in the sunlight, the colour of dark copper. She steps over the rocks into the sea and disappears under the water. Her arm rests at the surface for an instant, holding the long harpoon, then there's nothing but the water, the choppy waves. After a few moments the water parts and Ouma comes slipping out, just as she went in. She walks up to me on the beach, takes the octopus dripping with ink from the harpoon and goes back. She looks at me. There is nothing affected about her, nothing but wild beauty.

‘Come on!'

I don't hesitate. I undress too and plunge into the cold water. Suddenly I remember what I lost so many years ago, the sea at Tamarin when Denis and I swam naked through the waves. It's a feeling of freedom, of happiness. I swim underwater very close to the bottom, eyes open. I catch sight of Ouma over by the rocks searching with the tip of her harpoon in the crevices and the cloud of ink floating up. We swim together on the surface. Ouma throws the second octopus up on to the beach after having turned it inside out. She holds out the harpoon to me. A smile shines upon her face, her breathing is a bit hoarse. I dive down towards the rocks in turn. I miss a first octopus and I spear a second one on the sand at the bottom just as it leaps backwards, releasing its ink.

We swim together in the transparent water of the lagoon. When we're very near the reefs Ouma dives in front of me, disappears so quickly that I can't follow her. She reappears an instant later with a grouper on the end of her harpoon. But she unhooks the still live fish and tosses it back towards the shore. She motions me not to say anything. She takes my hand and together we allow ourselves to sink under the water. Then I see a threatening shadow swimming back and forth in front of us: a shark. It passes – two or three times, then swims away. We come up to the surface, gasping for breath. I swim to shore, while Ouma dives again. When I reach the beach I see she has captured the fish again. We run, side by side, over the white sand. Her body sparkles like basalt in the sun. With quick, precise movements, she scoops up the octopuses and the grouper and buries them in the sand near the dunes.

‘Come on. Let's go dry off.'

I'm stretched out on the sand. Kneeling, she takes dry sand in her hands and sprinkles it over my body from my neck down to my feet.

‘Put sand on me too.'

I take the light sand in my hands and let it run down on her shoulders, her back, her chest. Now we look exactly like two Pierrots smothered in powder and that makes us laugh.

‘When the sand falls off, we're dry,' says Ouma.

We remain on the dune near the reeds, dressed in white sand. There's nothing but the sound of the wind in the reeds and the rumbling of the sea drifting over to us. Not another living thing but the crabs that come out of their holes, one after the other, brandishing their uplifted claws. The sun is already at its zenith in the sky, it's burning down in the middle of this solitude.

I look at the sand drying on Ouma's shoulder and back, trickling down in little rivulets, uncovering the glowing skin. Ardent desire rises within me, burning like the sun on my skin. When I put my lips on Ouma's skin, she quivers, but doesn't move away. With her long arms wrapped about her legs, she is resting her head upon her knees and gazing into the distance. My lips move down along her neck, over her soft, shiny skin, where the sand is slipping off in a cascade of silvery particles. My body is trembling now and Ouma raises her head, looks at me anxiously.

‘Are you cold?'

‘Yes… No.' I'm not really sure what's happening to me. I'm shivering nervously, it's difficult for me to breathe.

‘What's wrong?'

Ouma gets up suddenly. She dresses with rapid gestures. She helps me put on my clothing, as if I were ill.

‘Come rest in the shade, come on!'

Is it a fever, exhaustion? My head is spinning. With great difficulty I follow Ouma through the reeds. She's walking very straight, carrying the octopuses on the end of her harpoon like pennants, holding the fish by its gills.

When we reach the camp I lie down in the tent, close my eyes. Ouma has remained outside. She's making a fire to cook the fish. She also cooks the bread patties that she brought this morning in the coals. When the meal is ready, she brings it to me in the tent and watches me eat without having anything herself. The grilled fish is exquisite. I eat with my fingers, hurriedly, and drink the cool water that Ouma has gone to fetch upriver. Now I'm feeling better. Wrapped in my blanket, despite the heat, I observe Ouma, her profile turned towards the outside as if she were keeping a lookout. Later it begins to rain, at first a drizzle, then large drops. The wind is jerking at the sailcloth above us, making the branches of the tamarind tree creak.

When the daylight is waning, the young girl tells me about herself, about her childhood. She speaks hesitantly in her melodious voice, with long silences, and the sound of the wind and the rain on the tent blend in with her words.

‘My father is Manaf, a Rodriguan from the mountains. But he left here to sail on a British-India ship, a large ship that went all the way to Calcutta. He met my mother in India, he married her and brought her back here, because her family was against the marriage. He was older than she was and died of fever during a journey when I was eight years old, so my mother placed me in a convent in Ferney on Mauritius. She didn't have enough money to bring me up. I also think she wanted to remarry and feared I would be a hindrance to her… At the convent I liked the Mother Superior very much and she liked me a lot too. When she had to go back to France, since my mother had abandoned me, she took me with her to Bordeaux, then to somewhere near Paris. I studied and worked in the convent. I think the Mother wanted me to become a nun and that's why she took me with her. But when I was thirteen I fell sick and everyone thought I was going to die, because I had tuberculosis… Then my mother wrote from Mauritius, she said she wanted me to come back and live with her. At first I didn't want to, I cried, I thought it was because I didn't want to leave the Mother Superior of the convent, but it was because I was afraid of going back to my real mother and the poverty on the island, in the mountains. The Mother Superior of the convent cried also, because she truly liked me, and also because she'd hoped I'd become a nun too, and since my mother isn't Christian – she kept the Indian religion – the Mother Superior knew I would be turned away from a religious life. And then I left anyway, I took a long journey alone on the boat, through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. When I arrived in Mauritius I went back to my mother, but I didn't remember her any more and I was surprised to find that she was so small, draped in her robes. Next to her stood a little boy and she told me he was Sri, God's messenger on Earth…'

She stops talking. Night is very near now. Outside the valley is already in shadows. The rain has stopped, but we can hear water dripping on the tent when the wind shakes the branches of the old tamarind tree.

‘In the beginning it was hard living here, because I didn't know anything about life with the Manafs. I didn't know how to do anything, I couldn't run or fish or make a fire, I didn't even know how to swim. And I couldn't talk, because no one spoke French, and my mother spoke only Bohjpuri and Creole. It was dreadful, I was fourteen years old and I was like an infant. In the beginning the neighbours made fun of me, they said my mother would have done best to leave me with the bourgeois. I wanted to leave, but I didn't know where to go. I couldn't go back to France, because I was a Manaf and nobody would have wanted me. And also, I liked my little brother Sri a lot, he was so gentle, so innocent, I think my mother was right to say he was God's messenger… So I started learning everything I needed to know. I learned how to run barefoot over the rocks, to run after and catch goats, to make a fire, and to swim and dive for fish. I learned how to be a Manaf and live like the maroons, hiding in the mountains. But I truly like being here with them, because they never lie, they never harm anyone. People from the coast in Port Mathurin are the same as the others from Mauritius, they lie and trick you, that's why we stay hidden in the mountains…'