The Prospector (4 page)

At the time we thought it was some sort of victory. But Laure and I never talked about it and no one knew what had happened that afternoon. We hardly saw Ferdinand in the following years. As a matter of fact it was probably that very year, the year of the cyclone, that his father put him in boarding school at the Royal College. We had no idea that everything was going to change, that we were living our last days in the Boucan Embayment.

It was around that same time that Laure and I realized something was not right with my father's affairs. He didn't speak to anyone about it, I don't believe, not even to Mam, so as not to worry her. Yet we could sense what was happening perfectly well, we could guess. One day as we're lying up in the attic as usual, in front of the bundles of old reviews, Laure says, ‘Bankruptcy. What does bankruptcy mean?'

She's not asking me the question, since she knows very well I have no idea. It's simply a word that is there, that she heard, that's echoing in her mind. A little later she repeats other words that are also frightening: mortgage, seizure, time draft. A large paper lying on my father's desk, which I hastily read, is laden with minute figures like fly specks. Two mysterious English words stand out:
assets
and
liabilities
. What does that mean? Laure doesn't know the meaning of these words either and she doesn't dare ask our father. They are menacing words, they hold a danger that we don't understand, like those series of underlined, crossed-out figures, some written in red.

Several times I awaken to the sound of voices, late at night. With my damp, sweaty nightshirt sticking to my skin, I creep down the hallway to the dining-room door. Through the open crack I can hear my father's deep voice, then other voices of strangers answering him. What are they talking about? Even if I listened to every word, I wouldn't be able to understand. But I'm not listening to the words. I hear only the gabbling of the voices, the glasses clunking down on the table, the feet scuffing over the floorboards, the chairs creaking. Maybe Mam is there too, sitting beside my father as she does at mealtimes? But the strong smell of tobacco enlightens me. Mam doesn't like cigar smoke, she must be in her bedroom, lying in her brass bed, also staring at the line of yellow light under the half-open door, listening to the strangers' voices, just as I am, crouching here in the dark corridor, while my father talks on and on for such a long time… Later I go back to the bedroom, slip under the mosquito netting. Laure doesn't budge, I know she isn't sleeping, that her eyes are wide open in the dark and that she's also listening to the voices at the other end of the house. Stretched out on my cot with canvas webbing, I wait, holding my breath, until I hear footsteps in the garden, the axles of the coach squeaking as it drives away. I wait even longer, until I can hear the sound of the sea, the invisible tide of night, when the wind whistles in the needles of the she-oaks and bangs the shutters, and the roof timbers groan like the hull of an old boat. Then I can drift off to sleep.

Denis's lessons are the most beautiful. He teaches me the sky, the sea, the caves at the foot of the mountains, the fallow fields where we run together that summer, between the black pyramids of Creole dead work. Sometimes we leave at the crack of dawn when the mountaintops are still caught in the mists, and the low tide in the distance is uncovering the reefs. We go through the fields of aloes along silent, narrow paths. Denis walks out in front, I can see his tall, slim, supple silhouette moving along as if he were dancing. Here he doesn't bark like he does in the cane fields. From time to time he stops. He looks like a dog that has caught scent of a wild animal, a rabbit, a tenrec. When he stops, he raises his right hand slightly, as a signal, and I stop too, listening. I listen to the sound of the wind in the aloes, as well as the sound of my heart. The first rays of dawn are shining on the red earth, lighting the dark leaves. The mist is tearing on the peaks of the mountains, now the sky is intense. I imagine the sea, azure-coloured out around the coral reef but still black at the mouth of the rivers. ‘Look!' Denis says. He's standing still on the path and is pointing at the mountain over by Black River Gorges. I see a bird very high in the sky, gliding along on the air currents, head turned slightly to one side, its long white tail floating out behind. ‘Tropicbird,' says Denis. It's the first time I've seen one. It circles slowly over the ravines, then disappears in the direction of Mananava.

Denis has started walking again. We're following the narrow valley of the Boucan, up towards the mountains. We walk over old cane fields that are now uncultivated, where nothing remains but short low walls of lava stone hidden under the bramble bushes. I'm no longer in my territory. I'm on foreign terrain, that of Denis and the black people on the other side, the people from Chamarel, from Black River, from Case Noyale. As Denis goes further away from Boucan and makes his way up towards the forest, towards the mountains, he grows gradually less wary, talks more, seems more relaxed. He's walking slowly now, his gestures are more casual, his face even lights up, he waits for me on the trail, smiling. He points to the mountains near us on the right. ‘Le Grand Louis, Mont Terre Rouge.' We're surrounded by silence, the wind has fallen, I can't smell the sea any more. The underbrush is so dense we have to walk in the bed of a torrent. I've taken off my shoes, tied the laces together and slung them around my neck, as I usually do when I'm out with Denis. We're walking in a trickle of cold water that runs over the sharp rocks. Denis stops in the bends, scans the water in search of camarons, of crayfish.

The sun is high in the sky when we reach the source of the Boucan high in the mountains. The January heat is oppressive, I find it hard to breathe under the trees. Striped mosquitoes come out of their nesting places and dance in front of my eyes, I can see them dancing around Denis's woolly hair too. On the banks of the torrent, Denis takes off his shirt and begins to gather leaves. I draw nearer to look at the dark-green leaves covered with fine grey down that he's harvesting in the shirt, now converted into a sack. ‘Dasheen,' Denis says. He splashes a little water into one of the curved leafs and holds it out to me. Caught in the fine down, the drop remains suspended, like a liquid diamond. Further on, he gathers other leaves: ‘Dasheen wrap'. On the trunk of a tree he points to a vine: ‘Mile-a-minute vine'. Palmate leaves open out in a heart shape: ‘Faham tea'. I knew that Old Sara, Capt'n Cook's sister was a ‘
yangue
' – that she made potions and cast spells – but this is the first time Denis has taken me to look for plants for her. Sara is Malagasy, she came from Grand Terre with Cook, Denis's grandfather, back in the slave days. One day Cook told Laure and me that he'd been so frightened when he arrived in Port Louis with the other slaves that he'd gone and sat up in a tree at the Intendance and refused to come down again, because he believed they were going to eat him, right there on the wharves. Sara lives in Black River. She used to come and visit her brother and she liked Laure and me a lot. Now she's too old.

Denis continues to walk along the torrent towards its source. The thin trickle of water runs black, smooth over the basalt rocks. The heat is so muggy Denis splashes his face and chest with water from the stream and tells me to do the same to freshen myself up. I drink some cool, light water right from the stream. Denis is still walking out ahead, along the narrow ravine. He's carrying the bundle of leaves on his head. He stops at times, motions to a tree in the thick of the forest, a plant, a vine, ‘Benzoin', ‘hart's-tongue fern', ‘Indian laurel'
,
‘tall balm', ‘mamsell tree', ‘prine', ‘glorybower', ‘tambourissa'
.

He picks a creeping plant with long, fine leaves and crushes it between his thumb and forefinger in order to smell it: ‘verbena'. Still further along, he walks through the underbrush until he reaches a tall tree with a brown trunk. He removes a bit of bark, makes a cut with a flint: golden sap runs out. Denis says ‘balltree'. I walk behind him through the brush, bent forward, avoiding the thorny branches. Denis moves agilely through the forest, in silence, senses on the alert. Under my bare feet the ground is wet and warm. I'm afraid, yet I want to go further, penetrate deep into the forest. Denis stops in front of a very straight tree trunk. He tears off a piece of bark and has me smell it. It's a smell that makes me dizzy: ‘rosin'.

We walk on, Denis is moving faster now, as if recognizing an invisible path. I'm suffocating in the heat and humidity of the forest, I'm having trouble catching my breath. I see Denis stopped in front of a bush: ‘coromandel'. In his hand a long, half-opened pod from which black seeds like insects spill. I taste a seed, it's bitter, oily, but it gives me strength. Denis says, ‘This food for maroons with the great Sacalavou.' It's the first time he's talked to me about Sacalavou. My father told us once that he died here, at the foot of the mountains, when the white people caught him. He threw himself off a cliff rather than return to captivity. It makes me feel strange, eating what he ate, here in this forest with Denis. We're far from the stream now, already at the foot of Mont Terre Rouge. The earth is dry, the sun is burning down through the sparse acacia leaves.

‘Ironwood,' says Denis. ‘Blackcurrant.'

Suddenly he stops. He's found what he's been looking for. He goes straight to the tree standing alone amid the underbrush. It's a handsome, dark tree with low, spreading branches that have thick green leaves with copper reflections. Denis is squatting at the foot of the tree, hidden in the shadows. When I come over he doesn't look at me. He's laid his bundle on the ground.

‘What is it?'

Denis doesn't answer right away. He's searching his pockets.

‘Affouche,' he says.

There is something in his left hand. Still squatting, Denis hums a little, like Indians do when they pray. He rocks his body back and forth and hums, and in the shade of the tree all I can make out is his back, which is shiny with sweat. When he's finished his prayer, he digs down into the earth at the foot of the tree with his right hand. The left hand opens and I glimpse a copper coin cupped in his palm. It slides down, falls into the hole, and Denis carefully covers it over with earth and a little moss that he takes from around the roots. Then he stands up and, without paying any attention to me, gathers the leaves from the low branches and lays them on the ground next to his bundle. With his sharp flint he peels away pieces of bark from the smooth trunk. A light-coloured milk oozes from the wound. Denis puts the bits of bark and the leaves of the affouche in his shirt and says, ‘We go.' Without waiting for me, he walks quickly away through the brush, goes back down the slopes of the hills towards the Boucan River Valley. The sun is already in the west. Over the tops of the trees, between the dark hills, I can see the fiery patch of sea, the horizon where the clouds are born. Behind me, the rampart of the mountains is red, heat is radiating from them as if from an oven. I walk hurriedly in Denis's footsteps until we reach the stream that is the source of the Boucan, and I feel as if I've been gone for a very long time, maybe for days, it makes me dizzy inside.

It was during that summer, the year of the cyclone, that my father threw himself back into his old project of creating an electrical power plant on Black River. When had it really all begun? I don't have a clear memory of it, because at the time my father had dozens of different projects that he dreamt of in silence, and about which Laure and I heard only faint echoes. I believe he had a project to build a shipyard at the mouth of the Black River, and also an aerostat project for transporting passengers between the Mascarene Islands and South Africa. But all of that was only pipedreams and we knew nothing about it except what Mam or the people who sometimes came to visit would say. The project for the electrical power plant was probably the earliest one, and it didn't begin to get underway until that summer, when my father was already hopelessly indebted. One day after class Mam talks to us about the situation. She talks about it for a long time, shiny-eyed, filled with excitement. A new era is to begin, we will at last know what it is to be prosperous, to not fear the future. Our father has had work done at Bassin aux Aigrettes, where the two arms of Black River flow together.

This is where he'd chosen to set up the power plant that will provide electricity to the entire western region, from Médine all the way to Bel Ombre. The generator he'd bought in London by correspondence has just been unloaded in Port Louis and it has come all the way in an ox cart down the coast to Black River. From now on the days of oil-lamp lighting and the steam engine are over and, thanks to our father, electricity will gradually bring progress to our island. Mam also explains electricity to us, its properties, its uses. But we are too young to understand any of that, except for experimenting, as we used to do every day back then, with the mysteries of the bits of paper magnetized by Mam's amber necklace.

One day, we all – Mam, my father, Laure and I – leave in the carriage to go out to the Bassin aux Aigrettes. It's very early, Mam wants to be back before noon because of the heat. At the second curve in the road to Black River we take the path that leads up along the river. My father has had the path cleared so that the ox cart carrying the generator could get through, and our carriage rolls along in a huge cloud of dust.

It's the first time that Laure and I have been up Black River and we're peering curiously at the surroundings. The dust from the path rises up around us, enveloping the cart in an ochre cloud. Mam has a shawl about her face, she looks like an Indian woman. My father is cheerful, he's talking as he steers the horse. I can still picture him, just as I'll never be able to forget him: very tall and thin, elegant, wearing his grey-black suit, black hair swept back. I can see his profile, his fine, aquiline nose, his neatly kempt beard, his elegant hands, which are always holding a cigarette between the thumb and forefinger, the way one holds a pencil. Mam is looking at him too, I can see the light in her eyes that morning, on the dusty road that runs along Black River.