The Prospector (30 page)

She says that simply, not braggingly, but in a hard voice, like someone who is sure of herself.

She also says, ‘You people from the upper crust believe that gold is the most powerful, most desirable of all things, and that's why you go to war. People everywhere are going to die just to have gold.'

Her words make my heart race, because I think about my enlistment. For a second I feel like telling Ouma everything, but I get a lump in my throat. I have only a few more days left to live here with her in this valley, so very distant from the world. How can I talk to Ouma about the war? To her it's evil, she would probably never forgive me, would run away immediately.

I can't tell her. I hold her hand very tightly in mine in order to fully feel her warmth, I drink in the breath from her lips. The night is balmy, a summer night, and the wind stopped when the tide went slack, the stars are countless and lovely, everything is filled with joy and peace. I believe that for the very first time I'm savouring the hours that are passing with no feelings of impatience or longing, but with sadness, thinking that none of this can ever be again, that it is going to be destroyed. Several times I'm on the verge of confessing to Ouma that we will never see each other again, but it's her laughter, her breath, the odour of her body, the taste of salt on her skin that stop me. How can I disturb this peace? I can't hold on to what will be inevitably broken, but I can still believe in a miracle.

Every morning, like most Rodriguans, I go and stand in front of the telegraph building in search of news.

The communiqués are posted on the veranda beside the door to the telegraph office. Those who know how to read, translate into Creole for the others. In the shuffle I am able to read a few lines: there is talk of French's and Haig's armies and of de Langle's and Lanrezac's French troops; about battles in Belgium, threats on the Rhine, the front lines on the Oise near Dinant, those in the Ardennes near the Meuse. I know those names from having learned them in the Royal College, but what could they mean to most Rodriguans? Do they think of the names like some sorts of islands, where the wind sways the palms of the coconut trees and the latanias, where you can hear the endless sound of the waves on the reefs, as you can here? I feel angry, impatient, because I know that in no time – maybe just a few weeks – I'll be over there on the banks of those unfamiliar rivers, in the middle of that war that negates all names.

This morning, when Fritz Castel came, I made something that resembles a testament. Armed with my theodolite I calculated for the last time the east-west line that passes exactly through the two mooring-ring signs on the two shores of the valley, and I identified the place in which this line intersects the north-south axis, as indicated by the compass, with the slight difference as calculated by the stellar north. At the point of intersection of the two lines, which is the centre of the valley of the Roseaux River, at the edge of the marshland that forms a tongue of land between the two arms of the river, I set down a heavy basalt rock shaped like a boundary stone. To get the rock there I had to slide it, with the help of the young black boy, over a path along the riverbed laid with reeds and round branches. I tied a rope around the boulder and, each of us pushing and pulling in turn, we brought it from the other side of the valley over a distance of more than a mile, all the way to the point that I'd marked ‘B' on my maps, and placed it on a small mound of earth that extends into the estuary and is surrounded by water at high tide.

All of this work kept us busy for most of the day. Fritz Castel helped me without asking any questions. Then he went back to his place.

The sun is low in the sky when, wielding a cold chisel and a large stone in the guise of a mallet, I begin engraving my message for the future. At the top of the boulder I cut out a three-inch-long groove that converges with the line linking the east-west mooring rings. On the southern face of the stone I make marks corresponding to the Corsair's principal points of reference. First there is the capital ‘M' representing the peaks of the Commander's Garret, the point of the
: :
punched into the rock, the groove indicating the ravine, and a round punch mark standing for the northernmost stone at the entrance to the estuary. On the northern face of the stone I chisel out five punch marks for the Corsair's five main landmarks: the peaks of Charlot, Bilactère, Quatre Vents that form the first south-south-east alignment, and that of Commander and of Piton that form a second, slightly divergent alignment.

I would also like to engrave the triangles on the Corsair's grid, which are inscribed in the circle that passes through the points of the mooring rings and the northernmost stone, and the centre of which – I now realize – is this boulder. But the surface of the stone is too rough to be able to chisel out such a precise drawing with my dull tool. At the base of the stone I simply mark my initials in capital letters, ‘AL'. Under that, the date in Roman numerals.

X
XII
MCMXIV

This afternoon, undoubtedly the last I'll be spending here in English Bay, I feel like taking advantage of the full-blown summer heat and having a long swim in the lagoon. I undress in the reeds facing the deserted beach where Ouma and I used to go. Today everything seems even more silent, remote, abandoned. No more do swarms of silver-coloured birds flush up, letting out their sharp cries. There are no more seabirds in the sky. There are only the soldier crabs that go fleeing over to the mud in the marshland with their claws raised skyward.

I swim for a long time in the very still water, brushing up against the coral that the sea is beginning to uncover. Eyes wide open under the water, I see the shallow-water fish go by, boxfish, pearl-coloured needlefish, and even a stonefish, magnificent and venomous, its dorsal fins bristling like rigging. Very close to the coral reef I flush out a grouper that stops to look at me before fleeing. I don't have a harpoon, but, if I did, I don't think I'd have the heart to use it against any of these silent creatures and then see their blood clouding the water red!

Back on shore in the dunes I cover myself with sand and wait for the setting sun to make the little trickles run over my skin, like when I used to be with Ouma.

I sit watching the sea for a long time, I'm waiting. Maybe I'm waiting for Ouma to appear on the beach, in the twilight, holding her ebony harpoon in her hand, carrying octopuses like trophies. Darkness is filling the valley as I walk back to my camp. Anxiously, hopefully, I look up at the tall, blue mountains at the back of the valley, as if today I would at last see a human shape appear in this stone-filled land.

Did I call out, ‘Ouma-ah'? Perhaps, but if so, in such a weak, strangled voice that no echo rose from it. Why isn't she here tonight, of all nights? Sitting on my flat stone under the old tamarind tree I smoke and watch the night creeping into the crook of English Bay. I think of Ouma, of how closely she listened when I talked to her about Boucan. I think of her face hidden by her hair, of the taste of salt on her shoulder. So, she knew everything, she knew my secret, and when she came to me on that last night, it was to say goodbye. That's why she was hiding her face and her voice was hard and bitter when she spoke to me about gold, when she said, ‘you people from the upper crust'. Now I feel angry at not having understood, angry at her, at myself. I walk around in the valley feverishly, then come back to sit under the tall tree where the night has settled in, I crumple up the papers and maps in my hands. None of it matters to me any more! Now I know that Ouma will never come back. I've become like all the others, like the people from the coast that the Manafs keep a watchful eye on from a distance, waiting until the coast is clear.

In the wavering dusk light I go running across the valley, climb up the hills to get away from the gaze that is coming from all sides at once. I trip over stones, cling to blocks of basalt, I can hear the earth shifting under my feet, tumbling all the way down to the valley bottom. In the distance, outlined against the yellow sky, the mountains are dense and black, not a light, not a fire. Where do the Manafs live? On Mont Piton, Mont Limon in the east, or on Bilactère up above Port Mathurin? But they never spend more than two nights in the same place. They sleep in the warm ashes of their fires which they smother at twilight, like the black maroons used to do in the mountains of Mauritius, above the Morne. I want to go higher up, all the way to the foothills of the mountains, but night has fallen and I'm bumping against the rocks, tearing my clothing and my hands apart. I call to Ouma again, with all my might this time, ‘Ou-maaa', and my cry echoes through the night, through the ravines, makes a strange bellowing sound, an animal-like moan that horrifies even me. So then I stop, lie down, propped on my elbows on the slope, and wait for silence to settle over the valley again. Then everything is smooth and pure, invisible in the darkness, and I don't want to think about what tomorrow will bring any more. I want to be the same as I used to be, as if nothing had ever happened.

We're no longer neophytes, any of us. We've all had our share of hardships, faced danger. All of us – the French Canadians of the 13th Infantry Brigade, Indians of the 27th and 28th Colonial Divisions – have experienced the winter in Flanders, when the beer froze in the casks, the battles in the snow, the fog and the poison fumes, the endless bombardments, the fires in the shelters. So many men have died. We hardly even feel fear any more. We are indifferent, as if in a dream. We are the survivors…

For months now we've been burrowing in the dirt of the riverbanks, in the mud, day after day, with no idea of what we're doing, not even wondering about it ourselves. We've been in this dirt for so long now, listening to the rumbling of cannon and the song of the death crows, time is utterly foreign to us now. Do days, weeks, months exist? Or is it rather just one identical day that constantly returns to find us sleeping in the cold dirt, weak with hunger, weary, one sole and identical day that is slowly wheeling round with the pale sun behind the clouds?

It's still the same day when we responded to Lord Kitchener's call to arms so long ago now, we don't know when it all began any more or even if there was a beginning. Boarding a steel castle, the
Dreadnought
, in the fog of Portsmouth. Then the train across the north, the convoys of horses and men marching through the rain along the railway towards Ypres. Did I live through all of that? When was it? Months ago, years? The men who were with me on that winter road in Flanders, Remy from Quebec, Le Halloco from Newfoundland, and Perrin, Renouart, Simon, whose origins I don't know, all of the men who were there in the spring of 1915 to relieve the British Expeditionary Force decimated in the battle of La Bassée… We don't know anyone now. We shovel this clay earth, dig the trenches, creep towards the Ancre River day after day, yard by yard, like horrid moles, towards the dark hills overlooking this valley. At times, in the silence that lies heavily over these empty fields, we shudder upon hearing the rat-a-tat of a machine gun, a mortar explosion off in the distance beyond the line of trees.

When we speak, it's in whispers, words that come and go, orders being repeated, contradicted, deformed, questions, news of newcomers. At night, when the cold prevents us from sleeping in our dugouts, a song that suddenly stops, and no one thinks to tell him to go on, that the silence is more painful.

We lack water, in spite of the rain. We're being devoured by lice, by fleas. We're covered with a layer of mud mixed with filth, with blood. I think about the early days when – in the streets of London, amid the red-clad foot soldiers, the squadrons of grenadiers, of lancers of the 27th and 28th Indian Army, sporting tunics and wearing their tall, white turbans in the biting cold air and the December sun – we proudly showed off the light beige Overseas Volunteers uniforms, the felt hats. I remember the endless festivities around St Paul's during the first days of the New Year, the cavalcades in the frost-covered gardens, the excitement of the last nights and then the joyous boarding on the wharves of Waterloo and the misty dawn on the deck of the enormous
Dreadnought
. The men in their khaki greatcoats, covered with sea spray, volunteers from the four corners of the Earth, filled with hope, searching the horizon for the dark coast of France.

All of that is so distant now, we're not even sure it really happened. Exhaustion, hunger, fever have blurred our recollections, worn away the marks etched on our memories. What are we doing here today? Buried in these trenches, faces blackened with smoke, clothing in rags, stiff with dried mud, surrounded for months now with the stench of latrines and of death.

We've become familiar with, indifferent to death. Little by little, it decimated the ranks of the men I learned to know in the early days, when we rode in armoured railway carriages towards the train station in Boves. An immense crowd, glimpsed from time to time through the boards covering the windows, marching through the rain in the direction of the Yser River Valley, scattered along the roads, branching apart, coming back together, branching apart again. Morland's 5th Division, Snow's and Bulfin's 27th and 28th Divisions, Alderson's 1st Canadian Division, October veterans whom we were to join along with the Territorial Army and the British Expeditionary Force. Back then we all still thought about death, but a glorious death, the death we spoke of to each other in the evenings, in the bivouacs: the Scottish officer, who, armed with a sword at the head of his men, had led the charge against the German machine guns. On the Comines Canal the impatient, excited men awaited the order to attack, listening to the sound of the cannon thundering day and night like an underground storm. When the order came, when we knew that General Douglas Haig's troops had begun their march on Bruges, there was a childish outburst of joy. The soldiers were shouting ‘Hurrah!', throwing their caps into the air, and I thought of the men in Rodrigues who were waiting in front of the telegraph office. The cavalry from the French Squadrons came to join us on the bank of the Lys River. In the dusky winter light their blue uniforms seemed unearthly, like the fine feathers of colourful birds.