by Peter Benson
‘Boy!’ she said, and cackled.
‘Mother!’
‘Think I didn’t know you were there?’ She took his arm and walked on.
‘No…’ he said, ‘but you made me jump, coming out like that.’
‘Ha!’ She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’
They walked towards the docks.
‘Why aren’t you more like your father?’
‘I…’
‘Odette’s more like him than you are. That’s not right.’
‘Odette just knows more things.’
‘No, she doesn’t. She just doesn’t let things she does know bother her. You should be like that…’
Leonard looked at his mother and wondered how she could talk. Talk about being bothered.
‘…he’d have wanted that,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘There you go again!’ She sneezed and spat across the road. ‘Who! And you’re still young. Look at me! I can’t…’ She stopped in mid-sentence, wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘He’s always strong here,’ and she went to the entrance to a side street and rubbed a wall there. ‘Feel him?’
Leonard shrugged.
Maude shrugged. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t,’ and she sat on the pavement, held a hand out and looked up at passers-by.
‘I’ll go across,’ said Leonard, and pointed. He might have been slow, but he knew enough not to beg too close to another. ‘Space yourselves,’ people had said. He squatted outside the post office, collected three cents in two hours and walked home alone.
16
One Tuesday, Odette begged seventy-five cents, cooked a meal of boiled fish and carrots, collected eight buckets of water, four bundles of scrap wood and chopped it. Leonard begged ten cents, watched his mother for a few hours, talked with her for ten minutes and helped Odette find some rope. Maude begged nothing, and felt her husband hang over her like a huge leaf, or a steady, personal shower of rain.
On Diego Garcia he had smelt of fish, salt, sweat and hair, a hint of woodsmoke and sometimes rum. Never much. Unlike other Ilois men, he’d always been careful with drink. He believed that the sea could smell drink. It would get jealous; drown a two-timing man. ‘You never know,’ he’d say, and sometimes stroke her hair or her cheek.
She stroked her own cheek. Odette watched for a moment before going outside, kneeling over a pile of sticks and striking a match. She fanned flames, fetched a pot of water and set it on a square of bricks around the fire.
Leonard was in disgrace. He sat on a wall by a wheelless car and shared a cigarette with other boys. He didn’t notice the weather and didn’t know what day it was. He wanted to but other things blocked his mind. Food, drink, clothes. Clothes were why he was in disgrace. His sister was ashamed of him, all his mother could say was, ‘Is it cooked?’ A short story.
He’d walked into Port Louis. He rubbed his stomach, picked his teeth and nodded at women by taps and children carrying baskets to school. People on buses, policemen directing traffic. He counted cars, the sun was hot all day.
He sat under the royal palms on Place d’Armes, enjoyed the shade and admired the clothes smart people wore. Bankers, merchants and civil servants. Officials in long cars swept into Government House. He watched them.
He was joined in the shade by a man who unwrapped an ice cream and sucked it. ‘Lick?’ he said to Leonard.
‘Me?’
‘Sure.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’ Leonard wiped his mouth. ‘Thanks,’ he said again, and licked.
The man asked questions. Leonard didn’t have any answers. All he knew was his name, the name of his home, the few things Paul taught him on Peros Banhos, the few things Odette and his mother had shown him, the fact that Ilois couldn’t go home. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘But you live in Port Louis?’
Leonard nodded.
‘And you’re Mauritian?’
‘No. I don’t think so. If you wanted to know, really, you’d have to ask my sister. She knows.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes.’
Leonard looked at the man and wondered why he was asking questions and sharing his ice cream. He asked him, ‘Why you want to know?’
‘Just curious…’
‘Curious?’
‘Sure.’
‘Why?’
‘I like to know about people.’ The man bit a piece of the ice cream and chewed it. ‘It’s my hobby.’
‘Hobby?’ Leonard didn’t know the word. ‘Where is your hobby?’
‘Where? It’s not anywhere.’
‘Then…’ said Leonard, but didn’t know how to finish. He had feelings about the man. He stood up. ‘Then I have to go, anyway.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Goodbye.’
He crossed the road and cut down an alley to the market. On Diego Garcia you could rely on people not to be strange. Port Louis was full of different people, but he couldn’t understand why about anything; Ilois couldn’t. However many times they asked questions about home, no official person gave them a word, or came to visit them in their shacks.
Leonard idled his way between market stalls. Many different types of goods were for sale. Racks hung with kitchen utensils, baskets full of chickens, tables of herbs and spices. Busy women picked their way through fruits and vegetables, children yelled at each other and squashed discarded tomatoes. Shirts and trousers hung from rails, T-shirts for tourists and dresses. Leonard’s eye was caught by a dress.
It was red and swung from a wire hanger. Other dresses hung on the same rail but it stood out. It wasn’t patterned, but its colour appealed to him. He couldn’t understand why – no different from any other time or thing – he went to it and touched its shoulder.
Cotton. Three buttons down the front. A shiny belt for the waist. He fingered it and looked around. No one was minding the shop.
He stole it in a flash. He didn’t think. He’d never stolen before. He crumpled it up, stuck it up his shirt and ran away, through the crowds.
Mothers with babies got in his way, traders carrying trays of cakes stopped to let him pass. A policeman shook his head and rolled his eyes. No one yelled, ‘Stop thief!’ No one noticed a thing. Market was where anything went on. One man running was as good as another.
He reached Roche Bois before daring to take the dress out and smooth it down. He smiled at it. Odette’s size. Odette’s present. She kept him and their mother alive. He had to do something. He had done something. He laughed and grinned from ear to ear when he gave it to her.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Market!’
‘But, but you couldn’t have enough money for something like this.’ She flicked it. ‘How did you…’
‘I took it. It was…’
‘Took it? What do you mean? You can’t just take things! Did you pay for it?’
‘No. But…’
‘But you stole it!’ She brushed a mark off the dress. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’
Leonard nodded. He should have known better. ‘Yes.’
‘Then take it back!’
‘But…’
‘Take it back!’ She stamped her feet. ‘Go on!’
Leonard wanted to say something about how their home had been stolen. He wanted to point at the rags she wore and say that one dress from so many didn’t matter, but he couldn’t. He walked back to the market and left it hanging on the entrance gates. It flapped there, more like some flag than clothes.
Odette didn’t call him for food. She decided to let him stay on the wall. Maude could eat his share. She deserved it. She sneezed.
‘You want some fish?’
‘Is it cooked?’
‘Of course it’s cooked! There’s rice too.’
‘I’ll call Leonard.’
‘No! Leave him. He can get his own.’
Maude shrugged. She would let her daughter decide. She had done enough for one d
ay – days rattled through her head like bones and she saw Raphael behind her eyes. She said, ‘He won’t be eating either,’ and chewed some fish.
17
If, between December and April, strong northerly trade winds meet gusting southerly trade winds, cyclones are likely to swing in banana-shaped paths across the length of the Indian Ocean. Oppressive heat and a deathly stillness are the first signs of one’s approach. Dogs wilt, roads melt at the edges. Cyclone Gervaise followed the classic pattern.
‘Help me,’ said Odette. She was carrying two buckets of water and stopped to get her breath back. She took a corner of her skirt and wiped her face with it. Leonard didn’t move. ‘HEY! LEONARD!’
He looked up, sulking. His hair had grown and hung in his eyes. On Diego Garcia, his mother had given him a regular haircut. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You can carry that one,’ and she left one of the buckets in the street.
He made a face but did as his sister said. He put the bucket in the shack and said, ‘Alright?’ to his mother.
She didn’t respond. The weather was upsetting. She didn’t like the closeness. She thought the air was trying to strangle her, the stillness grabbed sound and stifled it. Her cold had gone but a cough replaced it. She coughed.
Leonard hadn’t forgotten that she was his mother, but too many times some mood got in the way. He knew he should do more, but – he thought – he was still a boy. Odette was still a girl. He shook his head, thinking that a girl shouldn’t have to work so hard.
Two days later, Gervaise cruised off the ocean and wheeled across Mauritius. It tossed rocks that kept roofs down and threw galvanised walls, empty oil barrels, trees, goats and cars into ditches. Houses collapsed, boats sunk, rivers burst their banks, the rain poured in solid blocks a mile square and three miles high. Bus timetables were suspended and warnings issued by the meteorological office at regular intervals. Roche Bois was flattened. Odette and Leonard carried their mother outside and laid her in the street.
The Ilois had never seen anything like it. Diego Garcia had been outside the cyclone area, sandwiched between the equatorial current and the Indian counter current; the worst weather there had been rain storms. Sometimes the wind picked up for a few days, but died down quickly.
Maude bled from a cut to her forehead. A sheet of tin had hit her. She dabbed her fingers over the wound, tasted blood and said, ‘Salty,’ to Odette.
Other people carried dead people down the street. Children wailed, ambulances and police-cars sirened between hospitals and the shanties as firemen trained hoses on fires and workmen attached grapples to the sides of ruined shacks.
‘Salty,’ she said, and the scales fell from her eyes. She could see everything exactly. Uncleared cyclone rubble was piled in the streets she walked. Raphael’s spirit stopped haunting her. One day she was exploring his old stamping grounds, leaning on walls and sitting on boxes in side streets; the following morning, she woke up and said, ‘He’s dead,’ and meant it. ‘Gone,’ and she stood up straight.
Odette had forgotten how tall her mother was. She said, ‘He went years ago.’
‘Did he?’ Maude put a hand over her mouth. ‘What’s the matter, Odette?’
‘You look… look well. Your face is different.’
‘It is different,’ she said, ‘and I feel different. Yes!’ And she went outside.
The air was thick. She patted a dog, and when Odette prodded Leonard into following her, she said, ‘No. Not now. I’m going on my own. Don’t follow me today.’
Leonard shrugged and looked at his sister. ‘Bye then,’ he said and went to sit on a wall.
He didn’t watch his mother walk away; Odette did. She had more of her mother’s intuition than she knew. She lifted a hand to wave but it stuck in mid-air without moving; it clenched into a fist; Maude rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.
She didn’t mean to catch a bus but was standing by a stop when one came along, so she got on. The conductor asked her where she was going. She shrugged.
‘Rupees?’ he said.
‘Here,’ she said, and took three fifty cent pieces from her pocket.
‘One rupee to Pamplemousses. You want to go there?’
‘Pamplemousses?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look!’ The conductor was impatient. Other passengers hadn’t paid their fares, and the bus would stop again soon. An inspector was lurking. ‘Pamplemousses?’
Maude shrugged. ‘Okay,’ and she let him take the coins from her hand. She took the ticket but didn’t know what to do with it, so she screwed it up and dropped it on the floor.
The bus left Port Louis behind. Pepinere, Le Hochet. At Terre Rouge, the road forked. Three goats were sitting in the triangle of dust formed by the junction of roads, and chewed while traffic sped around them. One scratched and stood up, waited for a gap between two lorries, and walked across the road. It bit a hedge and sat down in someone’s garden. Children played in a school playground, priests left a mosque in solemn groups.
A policeman on a moped with a leather satchel tied to the front mudguard, overtook the bus, waved to the driver and accelerated away. Two old women stood in a doorway with baskets on their heads.
Half-built concrete houses, piles of rubble left in Gervaise’s wake, broken lorries parked on verges. Shops selling fruit, beer and cakes. Small men working at sewing machines in the open air.
Maude watched these things, and needed reminding when the bus reached Pamplemousses. The conductor helped her off. The driver shook his head. One of her breasts had fallen through a hole in her dress. She tucked it back in, and didn’t watch for traffic when she crossed the road.
Pamplemousses is famous for its Botanical Garden. This contains one of the finest collections of tropical plants and palms on earth, and enjoys a worldwide reputation. Maude stood in front of its gates and watched as tourists avoided the hawkers and boys. They yelled, ‘Hey!’
‘What?’ (said a tourist).
‘You want guide?’
‘No. We’ll find our own way round.’
‘No! You need guide. I am guide. I can show places you don’t know unless!’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless I’m your guide!’
‘Look! Can’t you read?’ Signs stated ‘There is no official guide to the gardens. Entrance is free.’
Maude couldn’t read. No hawkers bothered her. She walked through the gates, and along a broad avenue of massive palms.
Narrow paths led off the main avenue, through trees and beside lakes and ornamental ponds. Tunnels of greenery dripped coolness in every season; Maude sat on a stone bench beneath a portico of flame trees.
Her mind was very clear; she knew who she was and where she was, where she had come from and how her husband had died. She knew her son was called Leonard and her daughter Odette. She closed her eyes, listened to the sound of the wind playing in the trees, and smelt flowers. The gentle gurgle of a stream, the voices of passing guides…
‘These are the famous Victoria Regia lilies. They can support the weight of a small child! Further on we see the Fan Palm, or Talipot. This tree blooms only once, and then only after one hundred years. Then it dies!’
‘Here we have the celebrated Gourami fish. If you wish to pull some grass and toss it in the pond, you’ll be able to observe them eating the grass.’
‘This tree was planted by Princess Margaret of England.’
‘These deer are descended from the original Java deer introduced to Mauritius by the Dutch.’
‘These giant tortoises are over one hundred years old. Originally, they came from Aldabra, a group of islands situated north west of Malagasy.’
A gardener, walking home after a long day up an olive tree with a knife (his own property), passed the portico where Maude sat. He was a small man, tired and smelling the roasting lamb his wife would be cooking. She cooked outside, under a mango tree with all her children counted and waiting. She c
overed her hair with a shawl, adjusted it in line with her fringe and sang a song she’d been taught in school. She’d been a child in Port Louis but preferred Pamplemousses.
The gardener leant against a tree and took deep breaths. He wasn’t a talker. Botanists often asked him questions but he always feigned ignorance or deafness. He was paid to tend the gardens, knew they were famous and knew he was lucky to work in the shade; he nodded good night to another gardener and took a cigarette out of his pocket.
He turned around and struck a match on a trunk of a Talipot palm. He squinted, inhaled and tossed the match in the portico. He saw Maude and walked towards her.
‘Hey!’ he said.
Maude did not move.
‘Hey! We’re closing now. Time to go home.’ He went to her and shook her. She was stiff but her eyes were open. He jumped back when she fell off the bench. She had been dead for three hours.
She lay on the ground as if she was still sitting. Flies buzzed around her nose and drank the fluids that ran from her eyes. The gardener stared at her for a minute before going for help.
When she was carried away, he remarked that she was as light as a child, and when a policeman asked him to sign a form stating that he was the finder of the body, he smoothed his hair, felt proud and wished his family could see him.
18
Maude left an atmosphere in the Roche Bois shack. It bled from the walls as a palm tree, a man mending thatch, a chicken and an enormous sun throwing speaking beams of light across a foamed and spent ocean. ‘I’m not staying here,’ said Leonard – the most positive thing he’d ever said.
‘Nor am I.’
‘We’ll move.’
They carried their possessions away and found a shack on the edge of Cassis. The main Port Louis–Moka highway ran twenty-five yards from the door and an old woman stood on a stretch of waste ground, rocking backwards and forwards on her heels. She wore a grey cardigan in all weathers. No one knew who she was or where she slept, but she collected coins thrown from passing cars.
