Mo passé la rivière Tanier
Rencontré en’ grand maman,
Mo dire li qui li faire là
Li dire mo mo la pes cabot
Waï, waï mo zenfant
Faut travaï pou gagn’ son pain
Waï, waï mo zenfant
Faut travaï pou gagn’ son pain…
Mi guh dung a Tanier riva
Mi si a ole grandmada
Mi ax har weh shi a do deh
She tell me seh shi a fish mullet
Yeh, yeh mi pickney
Haffi wuk fi get yuh bread
Yeh, yeh mi pickney
Haffi wuk fi get yuh bread…
I see the smoke from fires over by Yemen and Walhalla, from up there on the heap of stones. On this particular morning they’re very close, right next to the shacks of Tamarin River, and I realize something bad is happening. Heart racing, I rush down through the fields until I reach the dirt road. The blue roof of our house is too far away for me to warn Laure about what’s going on. I can already hear the sounds of the riot when I reach the Boucan ford. It’s a rumbling sound like that of a storm that seems to be coming from all sides at once, that is echoing through the mountain gorges. There are shouts, grumbling, shots too. In spite of my fear I run through the middle of the cane field, without taking care to avoid being cut. When I come up in front of the sugar mill, the noise is all around me, I see the riot. The mob of gunnies is thronging around the door, all of the voices shouting at once. Facing the crowd are three men on horseback and I can hear the sound of their hooves on the cobblestones when they rear their steeds. Behind them I can see the gaping mouth of the furnace, where sparks are whirling.
The mass of labourers moves forwards, then back again in a strange sort of dance while the shouting rises and falls in strident modulation. Men brandish cane knives, scythes, and the women hoes and billhooks. Panic-stricken, I stand frozen to the spot, while the crowd jostles around me, encircles me. I’m suffocating, I’m blinded by the dust. With great difficulty I make my way over to the wall of the sugar mill. Just then, without my understanding what is happening, I see the three horsemen start to gallop towards the throng that closes in around them. The withers of the horses are pushing the men and women back and the riders are striking out with their rifle butts. Two horses escape in the direction of the cane fields, pursued by the angry cries of the crowd. They pass so close to me I throw myself to the ground in the dust for fear of being trampled. Then I glimpse the third rider. He’s fallen from his horse and the men and women have grabbed him by the arms, are shoving him around. I recognize his face, despite it being twisted with fear. He’s a relative of Ferdinand’s – a man named Dumont, the husband of one of his cousins – who is a field manager on Uncle Ludovic’s plantations. My father says he’s worse than a sirdar, that he beats the workers with sticks and if they complain about him he steals their pay. Now it’s the field labourers who are mauling him, hitting him, insulting him, making him fall to the ground. For a moment, in the midst of the crowd that is shoving him around, he’s so close to me that I can see the wild look in his eyes, can hear the hoarse sound of his breathing. I’m afraid, because I realize he’s going to die. Nausea rises in my throat, strangles me. My eyes fill with tears, I strike out with my fists at the angry crowd that doesn’t even see me. The men and women in gunny cloth pursue their strange dance, their shouts. When I’m able to get out of the crowd I turn around and see the white man. His clothing is torn to pieces and he is being carried, half-naked, at arm’s length above the crowd over to the bagasse furnace. The man isn’t screaming, isn’t moving. His face is a white blotch of fear as the black people lift him up by the arms and legs and begin to swing him in front of the red door of the furnace. I stand there, petrified, alone in the middle of the dirt road, listening to the voices shouting louder and louder, and now it is like a slow and painful chant punctuating the swinging of the body over the flames. Then there is one movement of the crowd and a great wild cry when the man disappears into the furnace. Then the clamour suddenly ceases and I can once again hear the dull roaring of the flames, the gurgling of cane juice in the large shiny kettles. I can’t tear my eyes away from the flaming mouth of the bagasse furnace into which the black men are now shovelling dried cane as if nothing has happened. Then, slowly, the crowd breaks up. The women in gunny cloth walk through the dust, veiling their faces with their head rags. The men wander off towards the paths in the cane fields, knives in hand. There are no more clamours or noises, only the silence of the wind in the cane leaves as I walk towards the river. The silence is within me, is brimming up inside me making my head spin, and I know I’ll never be able to talk to anyone about what I’ve seen today.
Sometimes Laure comes out into the fields with me. We walk down the paths through the cut cane and when the earth is too loose or when there are piles of harvested cane stalks I carry her on my back, so she won’t ruin her dress and her ankle boots. Though she’s a year older than I am, Laure is so light and fragile it feels as though I’m carrying a small child. She really likes it when we walk like that and the sharp-edged cane leaves open before her face and close behind her. One day in the attic she showed me an old edition of the Illustrated London News with an image depicting Naomi being carried on Ali’s shoulders through the barley fields. Naomi is laughing gaily, tearing off the heads of barley that are whipping at her face. She tells me it’s because of that picture that she calls me Ali. Laure also talks to me about Paul and Virginie, but I don’t like that story, because Virginie was so afraid to undress before going into the water. I think that’s ridiculous and I tell Laure it’s surely not a true story, but that makes her angry. She says I just don’t get it at all.
We walk over around the hills where the Magenta Estate and the rich people’s ‘chassés’ begin. But Laure doesn’t want to enter the forest. So we go back down towards the source of the Boucan. Up in the hills the air is humid, as if the morning mists are still caught in the leaves of the bushes. Laure and I really like sitting down in a clearing when the trees are barely emerging from the night shadows and watching for the seabirds to pass. Sometimes we see a couple of tropicbirds. The beautiful white birds come out of the Black River Gorges – over by Mananava – and they glide leisurely above our heads, wings spread like crosses of sea foam, their long tails trailing out behind. Laure says they are the souls of sailors who’ve died at sea and of the women who await their return in vain. They are silent, graceful. They live in Mananava, where the mountains are dark and the sky is clouded over. We believe it’s the place where the rain is born.
‘One day I’ll go to Mananava.’
‘Cook says there are still maroons in Mananava. If you go there, they’ll kill you,’ says Laure.
‘That’s not true. There’s nobody over there. Denis went very near to it and he told me that when you get there everything goes black, as if night were falling, so then you have to turn back.’
Laure shrugs her shoulders. She doesn’t like hearing those kinds of things. She stands up, looks at the sky where the birds have disappeared.
‘Let’s go!’ she says impatiently.
We head back towards Boucan, making our way across the fields. Amid the vegetation, the roof of our house shines out like a puddle.
Since she’s been sick with fevers, Mam hasn’t been giving us lessons any more, only a few recitations and a little Bible study. She’s thin and very pale, she doesn’t come out of her room any more except to sit in a lawn chair on the veranda. The doctor came from Floréal in his horse-drawn carriage, his name is Koenig. He told my father as he was leaving, the fever has fallen, but she mustn’t go and have another attack, for it would be irremediable. That’s what he said and I can’t forget that word, it’s always in my head, day and night. That’s why I can’t sit still. I have to move all the time, over mountains and valleys, as my father says, through the cane fields burning in the sun from early morning on, listening to the gunnies chanting their monotone chants, o
r else over to the seashore, still hoping to run into Denis coming back from fishing.
It’s the threat that’s hanging over us, I can feel it weighing upon Boucan. Laure can feel it too. We don’t talk about it, but it’s on her face, in her worried looks. At night she doesn’t sleep and we both lie there motionless, listening to the sound of the sea. I can hear Laure breathing steadily, too steadily, and I know her eyes are open in the dark. I also lie still on my bed, not sleeping, the mosquito netting drawn aside because of the heat, listening to the dancing of mosquitoes. Since Mam has been sick I don’t go out at night any more, to keep from worrying her. But in the wee hours of the morning, before dawn, I begin my excursions through the fields or else I go down to the sea, all the way to the outskirts of Black River. I think I still hope to see Denis appear upon rounding some bushes, or else sitting under an umbrella tree. Sometimes I even call him, using the signal we’d agreed upon, making the grass harp squeak. But he never comes. Laure thinks he’s left for the other side of the island, around Ville Noire. I’m alone now, like Robinson on his island. Even Laure is quieter now.
So we read episodes of the novel Nada the Lily by H. Rider Haggard, which are published every week in the Illustrated London News, illustrated with engravings that are a little frightening and make you dream of adventure. The journal arrives every Monday, three or four weeks late, sometimes in packets of three or four issues, aboard the British India Steam Navigation ships. Our father leafs distractedly through them and then leaves them on the table in the hallway and that’s where we watch anxiously for them to arrive. We take them up to our hiding place under the eaves to read them at leisure, lying on the floorboards in the baking dusk light. We read aloud, not understanding most of the time, but with such conviction that those words have remained engraved in my mind. Zweeke the witch doctor says, ‘You ask me, my father, to tell you of the youth of Umslopogaas, who was called Bulalio the Slaughterer, and of his love for Nada, the most beautiful of Zulu women.’ Every one of those names are deep within me, like the names of living people that we’ve met this summer in the shadows of the house we will soon be leaving. ‘I am Mopo who slew Chaka the king,’ says the old man. Dingaan, the king who died for Nada. Baleka, the young girl whose parents were killed by Chaka, and who was forced to become his wife. Koos, Mopo’s dog, who goes to his master’s side during the night while he is spying on Chaka’s army. The dead haunt the land conquered by Chaka, ‘We could not sleep for we heard Itongo, the ghosts of the dead, moving about and calling each other.’ I shiver when I hear Laure reading and translating those words, and also when Chaka comes before his warriors.
‘O Chaka, O Elephant! His justice is bright and terrible like the sun!’ I look at the engravings in which vultures glide through the twilight past the disc of the sun already half hidden by the horizon.
There is also Nada, Nada the Lily, with her large eyes and curly hair, her copper-coloured skin, the descendant of a black princess and a white man, she was the last survivor of the kraal Chaka killed. She is beautiful, mysterious, draped in her animal skin. Umslopogaas, Chaka’s son, whom she believes to be her brother, is madly in love with her. I remember the day when Nada asks the young man to bring her a lion cub and Umslopogaas slips into the den of the lioness. But here come the lions back from the hunt and the male ‘roared so loud the earth shook’. The Zulus fight the lion, but the lioness carries Umslopogaas away in her mouth and Nada weeps over the death of her brother. How we love to read that story! We know it by heart. To us, the English language – that our father has begun teaching us – is the language of legends. When we want to say something extraordinary or secret we say it in English, as if no one else could understand.
I also remember the warrior who strikes Chaka in the face. ‘I smell out the Heavens above me,’ he says. And when the Queen of the Heavens, Inkosazana-y-Zulu, also appears, announcing Chaka’s imminent chastisement: ‘And her beauty was awful to behold…’ When Nada the Lily walks up to the assembly, ‘Nada’s splendour was upon each of them…’ Those are the sentences we repeat tirelessly up in the attic, in the murky light at the end of the day. Today I feel they’re particularly meaningful – they encompass the unspoken anxiety that precedes metamorphoses.
We still daydream when we see the pictures in the journals, but now they seem inaccessible to us: the Junon bicycles or the ones from Coventry Machinist’s & Co., the Lilliput opera glasses with which I imagine I could scour the depths of Mananava, the Bensons keyless watches or the famous nickel Waterbury watches with their enamel faces. Laure and I read the line written under the drawing of the watches as if it were Shakespearean verse: ‘Compensation, balance, duplex escapement, keyless, dustproof, shock-proof, non-magnetic.’ We also like the advertisement for Brooke soap that shows a monkey playing a mandolin on a crescent moon, and together we recite:
‘We’re a capital couple, the Moon and I,
I polish the earth, she brightens the sky…’
And we burst out laughing. Christmas is already far behind us – a pretty sorry one this year, what with the financial worries, Mam’s illness and the loneliness of Boucan – but we play at picking out presents for ourselves in the pages of the journals. Since it’s only a game, we don’t hesitate to pick the most expensive objects. Laure chooses an ebony Chapell practice piano, an oriental pearl necklace and a Goldsmith & Silversmith enamelled and diamond broach representing a chick coming out of an egg! And it costs nine pounds! I pick out a silver and cut-glass carafe for her, and for Mam I’ve got the ideal gift: the Mappin leather toiletry case with an assortment of small bottles, boxes, brushes, nail utensils, etc. Laure really likes the case a lot, she says she’ll have one too, later, when she’s a young lady. I choose a Negretti & Zambra magic lantern for myself, a gramophone with records and needles, and of course a Junon bicycle – they’re the best. Laure, who knows my tastes, picks out a box of Tom Smith firecrackers for me and that gives us a good laugh.
We also read the news, already several months, sometimes several years old, but what difference does it make? The stories of shipwrecks, the earthquake in Osaka, and we pore over the illustrations. And there’s the tea with Mongolian lamas, Eno’s fruit salts with the lighthouse, and The Haunted Dragoon, a fairy alone, surrounded by a pride of lions in an ‘enchanted forest’, and a drawing for one of the episodes of Nada the Lily that makes us shiver: ‘Ghost Mountain’, a stone giant whose open mouth is the cave where the lovely Nada will die.
Those are the images that remain with me from back then, mingled in with the sound of the wind in the she-oaks up in the stuffy air of the baking-hot attic as the darkness creeps gradually into the garden around the house and the mynahs start their chattering.
We’re waiting, without really knowing what we should be waiting for. In the evening, under the mosquito net before drifting off to sleep, I dream that I’m in a vessel with full sails that is clipping along over the dark sea and I’m gazing at the glinting of the sunlight. I listen to Laure’s breathing, slow and even, and I know that her eyes are also open. What is she dreaming about? I think that we’re all on a ship heading north, towards the Corsair’s island. Then suddenly I find myself deep in the Black River Gorges somewhere around Mananava, where the forest is dark and impenetrable and where one sometimes hears the sighs of Sacalavou, the giant, who killed himself to escape the white men from the plantations. The forest is full of hiding places and poisons, it echoes with the shrieks of monkeys and up above my head the white shadow of the tropicbirds passes in front of the sun. Mananava is the land of dreams.
The days are long that are leading us up to Friday the 29 of April. They’re welded one to the other as if there were but one long day, interspersed with nights and dreams, far from reality, a day that already vanishes into memory just as I’m living it, and I can’t understand what these days hold, what burden of destiny they bear. How could I understand when I have no points of reference? Nothing but the Tourelle that I can see off in the distance between the tre
es, because it’s my lookout post over the sea and, facing it, the jagged rocks of Trois Mamelles and Rempart Mountain that are the guardians of this world’s frontiers.
There is the sun that burns down as soon as dawn breaks, that dries up the red earth along the furrows that the rains have dug after running down over the blue, sheet-metal roof. There were thunderstorms in February, with that east-north-easterly wind blowing over the mountains, the rain that gullied the hills and the aloe fields, and the torrents that made a huge stain in the blue lagoons.
So my father just stands under the veranda from early morning on, watching the curtains of rain moving over the fields, eclipsing the peaks around the Machabé and Brise-Fer mountains, where the electrical generator is. When the soggy earth glimmers in the sunshine I sit down on the steps of the veranda and sculpt little statues of mud for Mam, a dog, a horse, soldiers and even a ship with twig masts and leaf sails.
My father often goes to Port Louis and from there he takes the train to Floréal to see my Aunt Adelaide. She’s the one who will take me in next year when I enter the Royal College. None of that interests me in the least. There’s a threat weighing down upon us here in the world of Boucan, like an incomprehensible storm.
I know that this is where I live, nowhere else. This is the landscape I’ve been tirelessly studying for so long now that I’m familiar with every hollow, every patch of shade, every hiding place. With the dark chasm of the Black River Gorges, of Mananava, the mysterious ravine always at my back.
There are also our evening hiding places, the tree of good and evil where Laure and I go. We hoist ourselves up on the main branches, legs dangling, and sit there without talking, watching the light fading under the thick foliage. When the rain begins to fall around evening time, we listen to the sound of the drops on the wide leaves as if it were music.
The Prospector Page 6
