‘What have you done?’ you said, your face aghast. ‘Where is the Virgin I asked for? Why have you drawn that terrible pagan symbol?’
‘As a reminder of who you are,’ I said, determined to impose my message upon you. ‘That boy is you. You are the boy. I saw you cross, I saw it all with my own eyes, and I, too, crossed, for I could not let you cross on your own.’ You said nothing, yet I felt a hardening in you. You had become perfectly still. ‘I am Alula. I am the one who loves you. I followed you. I crossed too. I’m here with you.’ You stood and took your shirt and slung it over your shoulders with your back turned to me. The moment was over, I could tell, but I could not stop. I could not stop until I had told you everything you needed to know. ‘Something happened in the crossing, something went wrong. You can’t remember, or perhaps you can only remember it in your dreams. But this is who you are: you are Koahu, never forget that. You have crossed once, and you must cross again. The Law says there can be no crossing without a return crossing. I am Alula, and I will never abandon you.’ Still you said nothing, but only continued to button your shirt. ‘We must return to the island before it is too late.’
It was once your shirt was buttoned that you turned to me and, voice trembling, declared, ‘You will be punished for this, Joubert, mark my words. You are a madman and a fool, and you have humiliated the very man who saved your life.’
Then you walked away into the darkness without so much as a backward glance.
Later that day, the bosun Icard approached me. ‘What did you say to Roblet?’ he asked.
‘Nothing of consequence.’
‘Whatever it was, he’s complained to the captain. You’re not to speak to him again. If you do, you will be flogged – and this time Roblet won’t be there to tend to your wounds.’
Our luck only worsened in Macao. Just weeks before our arrival, the Emperor of China had granted the Russians a monopoly on the fur trade. After a fruitless month spent repairing the ship, with second-rate furs mouldering in the hold and tempers faring no better above deck, we continued our course towards the French colony of Isle de France, off the east coast of Africa. We moored in Port Louis for eleven weeks, waiting out the worst of the summer storms, and while the sailors caroused in the portside taverns and brothels, I was melancholic all the while, for I took what I saw on this island – the poverty, the sickness, the slavery – as a premonition of the fate of our own. In that time, I barely saw you. You were with the masters, guests of the colonial officials and plantation owners, attending balls and luncheons in their estates in the surrounding hills.
We set sail once more at the end of the storm season, and it wasn’t until Isle de France was little more than a smudge of blue ink on the horizon that I noticed your absence. I went looking for you in the sick bay below decks but I found only Reynier.
‘Roblet?’ he said. ‘He decided to stay in Isle de France. They were in great want of a surgeon. Perhaps I can help you?’
I turned away from him, masking any hint of my heart’s sorrow. I climbed down into the hold to sit among the rats and foul water, for at least here I could be alone and allow my heart to grieve in peace. When the bosun’s whistle blew soon after for the changing of the watch, I somehow took hold of my senses and climbed the ropes to the crow’s nest. I cannot say how I climbed those ropes without falling – for falling is what I wished for. I wanted to break my neck, I wanted to drown, I wanted to be swallowed by a whale. But my body acted in defiance of my heart. I climbed the rope-ladder and I stood upon that platform, looking out upon the sea and the sky.
It was dusk. The ship sailed sou’-south-west towards a tropical sun sinking into the ocean. It would have been as nothing to imitate that golden orb, to leap from my perch high on the mizzen mast and disappear into the water, leaving me to sink into my own everlasting night. My absence, most likely, would not have been noticed until the ship was long gone. Behind me, still within view but by now no more than a drop the size of the head of a pin between an infinite sea and an infinite sky, was Isle de France, the island we had left that very morning. Even though I could still see it with my own eyes, it was already as unreachable as if it had been on the other side of the world. I watched it until it was nothing more than an illusion of the eyes. Still I watched it, until the futility of the task impressed itself upon me: it was gone, and so were you.
The ship sailed onward. In the twilight, the evening star shone steady and true. One more time I wondered, should I let myself fall? Should I surrender to the longing for oblivion? The sea seemed to beckon to me, promising unending peace. But I did not succumb to its call. Instead, I made a vow. I cannot say to whom I made it, whether it was to me or you, to the gods above, or simply to the evening star shining in sweet solitude in the blushing sky ahead. To whom or what I cannot truly say, but I made a vow. And I did not fall.
By the time, weeks later, we finally arrived in Marseille, I immediately set about seeking a return passage to the island by way of Isle de France. It was already more than a year since we had left Oaeetee. In stifling August heat, I trawled the dens of the Vieux Port, visiting the offices of the shipping agents in search of a ship bound for the South Seas. When I told them where I wished to travel, some laughed at my foolishness while others gave me looks of contempt or pity. There were, I learned, no ships sailing to such places. The Solide’s expedition had been the first voyage to those parts to have ever sailed from this port, and it had stripped its investors of their fortune. By now, what’s more, all of France was gripped by revolution. The seeds of republicanism had sprouted all over Europe, and the continent’s monarchs were mobilising for war. Voyages of discovery, which had seized the public imagination for a generation, were now of little interest to the fledgling republic. If I wanted to travel to the remotest parts of that ocean, I was told, I should join a ship trading in furs or sandalwood or the oil of the sperm whale, as such vessels sailed the globe in search of their merchandise, and sometimes ventured as far as the South Seas.
But before I could return I had to find you again. I hatched a plan that would take me to Isle de France, where I might find you, convince you to come with me, and together we would find postings upon a ship bound for the Indies, then another bound for the Spice Islands, and another for Formosa, and thus by and by we would sail once more the oceanic waters of our home. I thought it might take me several months to find you, and perhaps several years before returning to the island. Whenever such thoughts entered my mind, I would be cast into despair, and only the most resolute determinations kept me from becoming altogether unmoored: what did it matter, I told myself, if it should take ten years or twelve, or even twenty years, for us to return? The only thing that mattered was that we should arrive, after all, and restitute the Law that our actions had offended.
Once more I took up the life of the sailor. I found a passage to Isle de France and searched for you there. I asked in all the taverns of Port Louis after the surgeon Roblet. I learned that only weeks earlier you had joined a ship bound for Coromandel, and thus I contrived a posting aboard a ship bound for that Indian colony. Once there, I learned that you had taken a position aboard a ship bound for Malabar.
And so began the years of searching: a dozen years chasing rumours of you from port to port, crisscrossing oceans and seas, asking in taverns and coffee houses after the surgeon Roblet, moving from table to table, sailor to sailor, asking the same questions over and over, so that my pursuit of you became my regimen, my raison d’être, my life. Countless times I engaged in the same conversation, and countless times I met the same reply: ‘What is his description?’ To this I had no special answer. In body, you were a man of no uncommon height and weight, with blue eyes and dark hair like so many of our compatriots, and no discernible deformities. You were possessed of both your eyes and ears; your nose and mouth were neither large nor small, your skin pocked by no illness, and the sum of all your fingers and toes was twenty. I could not say, ‘He has upon his shoulder a tattoo depicting an eye�
��, for, other than a surgeon’s mate, an ordinary seaman would rarely spy a master in a state of undress. But there was one particularity I knew of that would never be forgotten by any man who had sailed with you. And so I would reply, ‘His description is not special; he is a man like any other. Yet every night in his sleep he suffers such terrors that he is known to scream like the Furies.’ And thus at every port I went to I would soon find someone who had recently sailed with a man of that description, or who knew someone who had done so, and who would attest with various admixtures of bitterness and pity that the poor bedevilled soul had been relieved of his post at the nearest port, sailors being so thoroughly prone to superstition that such nocturnal behaviour had half the crew convinced a great curse had fallen upon them.
As well as being superstitious, sailors are also gifted tellers of tales. As a story passes from mouth to ear, ear to mouth, each teller adds to it some ingredient of his own. So it was not long before I noticed that the tales of you I encountered began to stretch and widen. The first time this happened was on the island of Gorée in Africa. I entered a rum shop and asked after you. One young lad claimed he had sailed on a ship with you the previous year and that you had travelled on to Argentina. Another sailor, an old salt, claimed to have been with you aboard a completely different ship only weeks previously, and that you were now on your way to New South Wales. Such contradictory reports began to occur ever more frequently until I realised that a myth of you had been born, and sailors, as is their wont in the idle hours of drink and card games, had added your story to the book of legends that they carried around in the libraries of their minds – your legend being that of the man of medicine cursed with a spiritual affliction without remedy, the surgeon whose malady was such that no ship would keep him. The greater the legend, the more distant you became. Eventually I felt I was no longer seeking a man but rather shadowing a ghost who was both everywhere and nowhere in particular. The legend of the accursed surgeon continued to grow and over time the stories of you became more vivid and varied. In Montevideo I heard tell of a dwarfish doctor with miraculous healing properties whose demons were so powerful the ship he sailed was cast into a vengeful maelstrom, killing all aboard save the surgeon himself – and the teller of the tale. Then, only months later, in Zanzibar, another sailor – a Moor – told of a doctor seven feet high with a great mane of red hair, whose terrors had proven such a malediction upon a ship bound for Ceylon that it had been becalmed for weeks on end and, by the time another ship had come upon them, all had died of thirst and hunger – all, that is, but the surgeon himself – and the teller of the tale.
And so, in the knowledge that it was one thing to pursue a man and another altogether to pursue a legend, I determined, several years after the dawn of the new century, with France no longer a kingdom or even a republic but a great empire stretching from one end of Europe to the other, to abandon my search for you and to take up another. Over the course of the following years, I sailed upon several ships that plied the furthest reaches of the oceans, ships that traded in fur and sandalwood and whale oil, in the haphazard hope that one such vessel might some day pass near our island, and I might somehow convince the captain to moor there. As the years followed one another, I must have circumnavigated the globe a dozen times, and neared the island on at least two occasions, but never more, at a guess, than within several hundred leagues. The first time was on a passage from Lima to the port of Manila, around the year 1805; the ship having recently moored at Easter Island for fresh water, we continued to sail without pause. The second time was in 1811, on a Nantucket whaler. When the lookout called land nor’-north-west, I watched the captain on the poop deck for his reaction. Again, there was none: the ship did not veer from its northerly direction, in search of the next whale. I was suddenly seized with a sickness to see my island so strong that I rushed to the larboard bulwark for a glimpse of dry land, but from the deck there was no such thing to be seen. I began to climb the rigging in the hope that I might catch sight of it from the crow’s nest. The bosun ordered me back to the deck but I pretended I did not hear. At the crow’s nest, I explained to the astonished lookout that I was landsick and wished to lay my eyes on solid ground – such madness is known to every sailor. The lookout explained that what he had taken for land had been nothing more than a dark bank of storm clouds on the horizon. I returned to the deck in a forlorn state only to find the bosun awaiting me. He pronounced a punishment of twelve lashes at next noon watch.
Both times I felt the nearness of it – I recognised the shapes of the sea and the wind, the colour of the sky, the smell of the air, the display of the heavens at night. But a seaman’s influence on a ship’s direction is akin to that of a flea on a dog. The power of setting a ship’s course resides solely in the hands of the captain. I would never have that power, for I was an ordinary seaman and my prospects were those of an ordinary seaman. My station in the world of men was to be my destiny.
Years passed. I travelled the length and breadth of every sea and ocean in the world. When I grew too old for work on deck, I cooked in the galley. Eventually, I grew too old even for this. In the spring of 1814, as the French Empire crumbled to dust and its emperor began his first exile, I found myself stranded, whale-like, on an island on the other side of the Atlantic, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The end of our youth invariably takes us unawares, and I had little intimation, having arrived in that famous port on the whaler Illumination, that this would be my last circumnavigation. I spent all summer in Nantucket seeking a berth on another whaler, and on each occasion some long-faced Quaker would reply that his crew was fully accounted for.
I took jobs on other ships, plying shorter routes between ports on the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean. I sank into melancholy. I worked harder than any other sailor and, when I was not working, I drank. There can be no crossing without a return crossing. The phrase hounded me day and night. Now that I was too advanced in age to sail vast distances, what was I to do? How could I return to the island before dying without making another, second crossing? I was trapped – to redeem my first sin, I would have to commit another. It was better to accept that there would be no return. After all, the world had not ended as a result of our betrayals. I began to doubt the Law. Perhaps it had been wrong. Perhaps it had been invented by humans rather than passed down from the gods for the purpose of regulating the traffic of souls, to preserve the order of identity, to prevent the chaos of untrammelled crossings. I began to entertain the idea that there was no consequence to a crossing without a return crossing – only this was no less of a torment than the preceding idea. If it was true, it meant that all my efforts to find you and to return had been in vain. I might as well have thrown myself into the sea after all.
And so, my faith in the Law diminished, the temptation to make another crossing was never far from my thoughts. The first imploring look from some wretched girl in a brothel somewhere, or some shackled boy below decks on a slave ship between Baltimore and New Orleans, and I felt my soul begin to stir. It would have been a trifle to make a crossing with such a girl or a desperate captive, exchanging old age for youth, but it would have been futile, for its effect would have brought me no closer to my destination. Only a crossing with a ship’s captain could advance me. I still yearned to return home, but to do so I needed to become a man possessed of the power to set a ship’s course. Such an endeavour was easier said than done, for how often does one have the occasion to look such a man in the eye? A ship’s captain must be a hard man, not given to prolonged gazing into the eyes of even his wife, let alone one of his crew. To look someone uninterruptedly in the eye for the several minutes it takes to make a crossing is a revelation either of the deepest love or the deepest hatred, and it is the duty of every sailor to earn the love of his captain, and the interest of every captain to withhold it. I never crossed eyes with a captain for more than an instant – to do so any longer would have earned me nothing but trouble.
With age, it became harder to fin
d employment, and sometimes I would find myself in one port or another – Nantucket, Baltimore, Caracas, Havana or Port-au-Prince – for weeks or months on end. Whenever this happened, I whiled away the hours in various taverns, coffee houses, gambling dens and brothels, waiting, with a deck of cards marked especially for the purpose, for a ship’s captain to sit at my table and take up a party of whist, like the orb spider who spins his nocturnal web and waits patiently in its centre for the passing insect, only to dismantle it in the morning. But not once did the spider trap his fly.
The very last days of my life were spent in the port of New Orleans, Louisiana. Having all but surrendered hope of making another crossing, I had just enough money to buy myself a bumboat, and spent my days running small errands for a few coins upriver and down, from town to plantation or plantation to town, between ship and shore, shore and ship, or making river crossings, ferrying people or cargo from one riverbank to the other. By night I drank and played cards, still spinning my nightly web, though more out of a taste for liquor, women and gambling than any higher purpose.
On a Monday afternoon in July 1825, I was in the back room of an inn playing widow whist for pennies with two other boatmen. It was late in the afternoon and outside a thick summer rain had emptied the streets, with peals of thunder that threatened to crack open the sky itself – a great thunderstorm of the tropics. The clatter of heavy raindrops upon the tin roof was like the applause of an audience in an opera house, making conversation impossible. Throughout the room, glints of droplets trickled through the rusty tin overhead and fell with a thud to the sawdust floor.
In the tumult of the rain, the entrance door opened and in walked a man in a dark woollen suit unsuited to the climes, so soaked through he looked as if he had just stepped out of a river baptism. I did not recognise him, nor, from the looks upon their faces, did my companions. He stood for some time in the entrance, accustoming himself to the darkness, rivulets of water trickling from his sleeves and the hem of his coat. He carried in each hand a leather satchel, which appeared heavy and well travelled, marking him a man of modest means, for a wealthier man would have engaged a porter to carry his luggage, and there would have been more of it.
Crossings Page 18
