The Prospector (3 page)

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.