Genie and Paul

by Natasha Soobramanien

  It was only then, absurdly, that Paul wondered what it was that Jean-Marie had asked of Père Laval.

  (ix) Articles de luxe

  On the bus from Gaetan’s to Port Louis, Paul noticed the small roadside shrines. He thought, Who has died? They reminded him of the bunches of tired flowers you saw tied to lamp-posts on treacherous stretches of London road. But these shrines, he realised, were exactly that: little drive-by places of worship.

  Mauritius was even smaller than it had appeared when he’d arrived more than a fortnight previously. Everywhere he looked, those same fields of cane, those same small cement-block houses, the pyramids of black rock cleared from the fields where the cane grew. The landscape seemed to be repeating itself. But Paul was leaving that night for an even smaller island: Rodrigues. Gaetan’s words had shaken him. Paul had no wish to stay in Mauritius, but nor could he go back home. So he was moving on. The fact that Rodrigues still lay in ruins after the cyclone did not discourage him: he’d be left alone there. He could hide out among the broken trees and the people trying to rebuild their lives.

  The previous evening, Paul had taken Gaetan out for a Chinese meal in Flic-en-Flac to say goodbye. Gaetan, still guilty from his outburst, tried at first to dissuade him. He sat twisting a napkin which bore stains that could no longer be washed out. But Paul had decided.

  Those things you said. You were right. I should go. But before I leave, there is someone I want to see.

  Before you go, said Gaetan, I want to know. Why did you come? What happened in London?

  Paul had always thought of Gaetan as a simple man, and sometimes, even, a stupid one. Paul thought this because there were times when he said things that Gaetan appeared not to fully understand. Now Paul was at a loss to offer any kind of explanation, or, at least, one he thought Gaetan might understand. He realised that although he could be quick-witted in Creole, bantering and bartering in it, he lacked sufficient fluency for the language he needed now. Or perhaps it wasn’t the language he was lacking. All he could think of was, mo onte, I’m ashamed.

  And after he’d told Gaetan the full story, of how he had just run away and left Genie there, Paul had said to Gaetan, Mo onte. And Gaetan had said nothing, and couldn’t even meet his eye. He understood shame, at least.

  At first, the capital seemed not to have changed much. At the bus station, the buses looked as clapped-out, the terminus as pot-holed, the pavement as cracked as he remembered. Walking through the city’s heat – more intense here than on the coast – Paul recognised the ornate dilapidation of old colonial buildings, and the shabby little old-fashioned shops with signs in faded, fancy-lettering advertising articles de luxe. Luxury items. In fact they sold exercise books, brooms, skipping ropes, buckets, washing lines, footballs, shoe polish, beauty creams, tinned cheese, hair dye.

  The same produce was being sold in the bazaar with the same patter: the pyramids of chillis green as vipers, the milky blue glasses of aluda. But here in Port Louis, Paul noticed, people spoke French to you now. Creole had become the language of intimacy. It was offensive to speak it to someone you didn’t know. And set back from the road, behind professional fencing, he noticed more new buildings in the commercial district, shiny plate-glass tower blocks with mirrored surfaces – almost as tall, but not quite, as the royal palms which lined the central avenue stretching down to the new waterfront development, Le Caudan.

  Le Caudan was where he was going. There he passed through colonnades of shops that sold real articles de luxe – duty-free jewellery, exquisite pieces sculpted from local wood. It was odd to think of Maja here. But this was where he worked now. Gaetan had not understood Paul’s need to see him. Paul did not understand it fully himself. Thinking about it now, he guessed he wanted to know if that night had changed Maja’s life irrevocably – changed Maja – the way it had changed him. As for the others – Chauffeur, London, Tilamain – when he thought of them as they were when he’d known them, he could imagine them running riot in the air-conditioned corridors of this place, laughing at all the expensive tourist trinkets, eyeing up the designer watches and hi-tech gadgets with a kind of juicy, vital envy. But if he thought of them as they probably were now, he did not like to think of them here. They would look awkward, shabby, slightly apologetic. A bunch of guys in their late thirties, early forties, married probably, with their wives and their sweaty vests, their pirate DVDs of dubbed American action movies, their football pools, their fly-swats and their Saturday bets during the turf season. He was scared to see them. He was scared of their disappointment, their resentment: that someone with his opportunities should have squandered them so royally. And he was scared that they would be as fucked-up as he was. There were relatively few ways to get fucked-up in a country this small, but it was possible: he did not want to see if they had turned to drink or to horses, to drugs or to loan sharks; if their wives, their families had turned their backs on them. He did not want to know if they were unemployable now because the kinds of jobs that were plentiful these days were what they would have seen as women’s work – jobs in hotels, in textiles. Or work that was for skilled people. Educated people. How could he face them, with his privileged life, as they always saw it – with his chance to see the world, his freedom to love whomever he wanted to love?

  Mauritius had corrupted him: he had come to this tiny island and he had felt like a giant, or a man at least, though he saw too clearly now that he had only been a boy. Paul had felt, when he left them, a sense of being old before his time. He’d believed when he’d gone to London that there he really could do anything, really could go anywhere. And in the face of all that opportunity, that responsibility – he’d been paralysed.

  At Burger World, Paul joined the queue to be served. When the Chinese kid behind the counter asked what he wanted, he asked to see Maja. The kid called out to the kitchen. Maja – an older, slower, more dishevelled Maja in a Burger World baseball cap and apron – appeared in the doorway. Saw Paul. Almost gasped.

  I’m leaving for Rodrigues tonight, Paul said. I’m on my way to the port. But I wanted to see you.

  Maja took off his apron, lifted the counter and came through. He led Paul to a free table which was shaped like a toadstool, the seats shaped liked smaller toadstools.

  I often thought about writing to you, Maja said. To explain why things happened the way they did. Why I was the way I was. But now you are here, Maja said.

  Tell me, said Paul.

  (x) Maja’s Story

  I saw a film once. I forget the name. In it, a soldier, an American soldier, goes AWOL during the Second World War. He is hiding on an island in the South Pacific. On this island, children play freely. They swim and they fish and they laugh. The people are beautiful. Happy. Everyone has enough to eat. Everyone shares. They sing. It’s the most beautiful singing. The soldier thinks he’s found Paradise. That was what it was like on my island. That was the life I knew until I was six years old. I lived in a small cement house near the sea with my father, and mother and my twin sisters, Marie-Laure and Giselle. You didn’t know I had sisters, did you? And my dog, Fusette. We called her Fusette because she was shaped like a little rocket. Me and Fusette went everywhere together. She used to swim in the sea and catch fish for me! You wouldn’t believe what that dog could do. Then one day, when I was six, everything changed. One of the twins, Marie-Laure, got sick. My father took her to Mauritius to get her seen by the doctors there. But, like everyone who had travelled over on that ship, they never came home. Once they arrived in Mauritius, they were told they no longer had the right to return to the island. To live on it. None of us did. It was a time of great anxiety and confusion. We were all told that we would have to leave. No one wanted to go. But then the ship that used to bring our supplies – all the things we couldn’t make or grow for ourselves on the island – stopped coming. It was as though the outside world had forgotten about us. People started arguing over things they would not have argued about before. There was a breadfruit tree in our neighbour
’s garden. We used to help ourselves to the fruit which grew on the branches overhanging our garden. But now the neighbour started complaining about this. She was an old woman who lived alone. We often helped her out with things. Fetching wood, sharing our catch, and so on. She said the tree belonged to her and we weren’t to eat the fruit on it. But she could not have eaten all that fruit herself, never mind collected it! My mother got angry and said if that was how she was going to be then we would not want her fruit, which would taste bitter to her anyhow. So we were forbidden to touch the fruit, which went ungathered and fell off the tree and rotted into the ground. And all this time my father and Marie-Laure were still in Mauritius. We had no news of them. We were worried for Marie-Laure’s health, besides. It was around this time that we started seeing strangers on the island. White men in uniforms, with charts and instruments. They would smile at us kids but we were afraid of them. And shortly after the men arrived, the dogs began to disappear. One day, I was out on the beach with Giselle and Fusette. Fusette just darted up the shore to something which looked like a washed-up log. She started circling this log, crouching low and howling. We ran to look. It was Hector, a neighbour’s dog, a very handsome Alsatian. When I tried to take Fusette away from this awful scene she bit me. She had never bitten me before. After that, the bodies of more and more dogs began to turn up, bloated and fly-blown. They had been poisoned. We were told by these officials – the white men in uniform – that arrangements were being made for us to leave the island. We were angry about this. But then came one terrible night. I will never forget it. My mother had refused to let me play out that day. I snuck out into the yard anyway to take Fusette her rice – our dogs ate what we ate – but she was not there. Before all this, we had let her run free, like all the other dogs of the island. But during this time we had kept her tied up in the yard so that she would not disappear like the others. But now she was gone. I wanted to go looking for her but my mother would not let me. I cried and screamed. My mother slapped me. She had never hit me before. She said it was not like how it was before. Things were changing. It was too dangerous for me to be out on my own. Strange things were happening. I was sent to my bed where I just cried and cried, imagining what might have happened to Fusette. I must have sobbed myself to sleep because I woke in the middle of the night. I had had a nightmare. And as I gradually became more awake I realised with a growing horror that the terrible sounds I had heard in my sleep were coming from outside, from reality, and not from my bad dream. It was a howling, a terrible howling, of many, many dogs. And one of them, I know now, would have been Fusette. It was the British Government who ordered the rounding-up and the gassing of our dogs. It was the US Navy who did it. No, not the Navy. Members of the Navy. Young men, younger than we are today. Men like the soldier in that film. Men who probably liked dogs themselves. Who might even have grown up with dogs, or had them back home. It was these men who slaughtered our dogs, and how they could do it I do not know. After that, no one resisted the orders to leave. We were allowed one suitcase per family. We didn’t have much but most of us had more than could fit in a suitcase. My father had made me a kite. Such a pretty thing. I had to leave it behind. He will make you another one, my mother promised. A better one. If there was one consolation in all this, it was that we would be reunited with Papa and Marie-Laure after almost a year apart. I don’t know if I can impress upon you – I certainly couldn’t fully conceive it at my young age – the enormous pain of standing on the deck of a ship, watching your island recede from view, not knowing when you will see it again. Of course, never, for some who died shortly after we got to Mauritius. And never, we were told by the British Government. But we could not think ‘never’ as we watched it disappear from view until all we could see around us was the sea, which is like saying the middle of nowhere. It was a horrible journey. We slept on bags of birdshit in the hold, listening to the horses on deck. They sounded terrified. They made a terrible sound. But we were strangely silent. In shock, I think. We were offloaded in Mauritius, and taken to our new home. I almost laugh to think about it now, but if I could imagine a place that was the exact opposite of our island, it was the place they took us to. An abandoned estate. More like a barracks. No glass in the windows, no water. Filth in all the rooms. Rats, cockroaches. A prison. As if we were being punished for something. And the man who came to meet us there, my father, was no longer my father. Not the man I recognised. He had grown thin. He was so painfully thin that it seemed to me as he walked towards us that he was in pain, as though his bones which stuck out of him like knife blades cut him up as he walked. He smelt strange to me. Marie-Laure was dead. She had been very sick. They had given her medicine for the pain and after she had died my father had taken what was left of it for his pain. And this thing which was all he was living for now was killing him. Giselle died soon after we arrived. She had what we came to call sagren. It’s a word that means sadness, regret. It eats you up inside. It turns you into a shadow. We never saw my father much, after that. Me and Mam moved from the prison to a place in Port Louis. The night Jean-Marie died, when we went to visit the marsan, do you remember? Do you remember the miserable state of his place? We lived in a place worse than that. But my mother didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to care about anything by then, not even me. Do you remember the woman from that night? The whore we paid to have sex with you? That is what my mother did. What she became. A shadow, I tell you. I am one of the lucky ones. In prison, I found Allah. Or he found me. And now I know a kind of peace. I do not touch alcohol, I do not touch cigarettes, I do not touch ganja, I do not touch women. But you, I can see sagren in you. You are not the boy you were. I know why you’ve come looking for me, after all that happened. After what I did to you. I took your brother. Allah has sent you to me. So I can look you in the eye and ask your forgiveness, and tell you to open your heart to Allah, and become my brother. That is the only way I can make amends for what I did to you.

  (xi) February 1988

  The first time Paul met Gaetan was at Tamarin. Gaetan had never really been part of Jean-Marie’s regular crew: he was a surfer and had his own friends. And he was a fisherman, a country boy, living south. But he was a cousin of one of the gang and Jean-Marie had always liked him. Gaetan rarely came up to Port Louis, but every now and then they’d all head down to La Gaulette to meet up with him, to swap beer and ganja for some of his catch, which they’d cook up on the beach. Paul met him the day Chauffeur got his truck and drove them all down to the beach.

  It was a Saturday. Paul and Jean-Marie and some of the others were helping a neighbour build a terrace on his roof. Most of the roofs in Pointe aux Sables were flat and looked unfinished, with rods poking up out of the cement, left like that to give their owners the option of extending upwards when the money was available. But then there were newer houses, built with pointed roofs in the Western style.

  What a statement to make to the world, Jean-Marie had said to Paul, pointing these out. That you have reached your potential for growth.

  Work was finished for the day and they sat around sharing a bottle of beer. Maja took a swig, then spat it out.

  If I’d wanted a hot drink I would’ve had tea.

  Jean-Marie laughed and took the bottle from him.

  If we’d done things my way, he said, we would have finished quicker and this wouldn’t have had time to sit around sunbathing…

  Maja took a spent match from the floor and started to prod at a millipede crawling by his flip-flop. It avoided his attentions, executed an elegant feint and rippled away. He flicked the match at it. Paul was still looking at the millipede – impressed by its economy of movement – when he heard a truck pull up outside the house. An unfamiliar horn sounded. Maja looked down.

  Well, fuck me! Chauffeur’s got his transporte!

  Most of Jean-Marie’s gang, his friends and cousins, had two names: their birth name and another acquired once people had worked out who or what they were:

  – Chauffeur was Cha
uffeur because he was a bus driver.

  – London was London because he had been there once and talked of it often (Where did you stay? Paul had asked, and London, raising bulging eyes to the sky, had said dreamily, Croydon…).

  – Tilamain was born with an unformed hand.

  – Maja meant ‘crazy fun’. Paul never did find out what his real name was.

  – And Jean-Marie was sometimes known as Zanblon because he was as purple-dark and neatly made as the fruit itself, and Paul secretly thought that his personality had a sharp, complicated flavour too. They liked to complicate the flavours of their fruit, these Mauritians: if you stopped on the street at a bike-kiosk – a glass case attached to the back of a moped, the case stuffed with zanblon, goyav desin, slices of small Victoria pineapple – you were offered with your fruit a twist of paper filled with pinkish powder, like sherbet, to dip it into. It wasn’t sherbet though but disel piman – a mix of chilli powder and salt. The colour of the earth in the cane fields.

  Until that Saturday, it had felt to Paul as though he and the gang were always running around looking for something – ganja or transport or beers or money or girls or a radio station playing good seggae or sometimes just one of the others. So when Chaufffeur got his truck everything changed: one less thing to look for, and something to help them go looking for everything else they needed. It was a sweet little Toyota flat-bed in good nick – only two years old, with 60,000km on the clock and a decent stereo. It was smart, too: glossy black paintwork and an aquamarine trim. They circled it, squatting down to examine the tyres, rapping a couple of times on the body to check out how it sounded. They smiled at each other in approval, though only Jean-Marie was a mechanic. Then they unhooked the tail of the truck and sat on it. They peered through the open window into the driver’s cabin and turned up the volume on the stereo.