Genie and Paul (12 page)

It was Jean-Marie who died, but it was Paul who felt like the ghost. In the days following the funeral he wandered alone around the house, trying to walk through walls. Gaetan, who’d not heard from him in days, called round and was concerned at the state in which he found his friend. You’re coming with me, he told Paul, and Paul, feeling no impulse to the contrary – no impulses whatsoever – did not object.

In the state that he was in – beyond desires – and with Gaetan’s good grace, Paul might well have remained in La Gaulette indefinitely. But then, after a month or so, came a chance encounter on the beach. After this, Paul realised he should return to London.

At Gaetan’s, Paul shifted from ghost to shadow. Lacking the ability to progress through the day unaided, he took to copying Gaetan’s every move. And, since Gaetan rose every morning before the sun did, to walk to La Gaulette and drag his
pirog
down to the sea where under a pale violet sky he rowed out to the reef and cast his nets, so did Paul. And because Gaetan spent the afternoon squatting under a tamarind tree by the shop – the morning’s fishing over, his catch sold – drinking until sundown, Paul did too. Paul followed Gaetan in tossing back rum in front of the television until sleep hit them; the day that followed played out in much the same way as the previous one had.

All this Paul did without thinking, or feeling, both intellect and sentiment overwhelmed by an almost hubristic
and hysterical sense of physical self. He ached in a million places from his sleepless nights on Gaetan’s floor. His head thrummed from the almost constant rain that battered the tin roof of Gaetan’s shack – the wet season, drawing to an end, seemed all the wetter for it. He seemed to be permanently hungry, eating as though he were hollow and trying to fill the hole in himself. He could not pass a woman, pretty or otherwise, without the instant threat of an erection. At times Paul’s senses were so overstimulated that they became wildly uncalibrated and he experienced a kind of transcendental synaesthesia, so that when he walked on the beach before dawn he would confuse for an exhilarating second the grit of wet sand grains that rubbed between his bare feet and
flip-flops
with the stars still pricking the sky.

Out at sea, Paul would fall into a trance. The sea, unsettled by recent storms, became more agitated by the day. The waves smashed against the reef and Gaetan’s jaw would clench with fear. Gaetan took to bringing a rum bottle with him, on which he pulled more and more as the days passed, while Paul stared at rainbows in the spray, following without question Gaetan’s instructions. They caught fewer and fewer fish.

The day before their last ever fishing trip together, Gaetan had taken less than half his usual catch. They were sitting under the tamarind tree drinking, barely stirring in the heat. The question of their diminishing catch arose in conversation. Then Gaetan, apparently changing the subject, asked Paul if he had heard about some islands of near mythical beauty close by, where no people lived and turtles made pilgrimages to lay their eggs.

No, said Paul.

There are no women allowed on those islands, Gaetan told him. But one day a fisherman broke this taboo and brought his fiancée – in disguise – on board ship, telling
the rest of the crew she was his little brother. They reached the islands safely and found a lagoon where all was calm and you could find big turtles so gentle they let themselves be taken without trying to escape. Then all the men disembarked to spend the night on land. That was when the storm broke. It swept over the island. The men took refuge in the trees, praying to the Virgin and the saints as their boat was smashed to splinters by the maddened waves. Then a huge wave bigger than all the others rolled in towards land and tore up a rock where some of the men were sheltering, washing them all away. As suddenly as the storm had broken, the wind then dropped, the sea was stilled and the sun broke through the clouds. The men fell on their knees thanking God but they heard a mournful voice crying,
Aiyo, tifrere!
It was the young fisherman. His fiancée had been swept away. He had caused the storm by bringing his lover to the island. He dared not admit what he had done and could only cry out for his ‘little brother’.

That’s nice, Paul said. It reminds me of
Paul et Virginie.
You know, the boy losing his love to the sea.

All our stories remind you of
Paul et Virginie.

And Gaetan sucked his teeth and finished the bottle of rum without speaking.

Paul thought of Genie, and how long it had been since he had in fact last thought about her. Then he wondered why Gaetan had told him this story.

The next day, they caught no fish. The waves were purple, the sky was swagged with clouds and the wind moaned over the heaving water. It’s biblical out here, Gaetan muttered, casting his eyes aloft, Gaetan himself transformed for an instant into an Old Testament engraving as he was illuminated by a break in the clouds. Hauling in their nets, Paul caught Gaetan glancing at him in the same way he had at the heavens. Suddenly Paul felt bereft, as though with that
silent accusation Gaetan had severed the invisible thread which had fated Paul to follow, unthinking, his friend’s every movement. This feeling persisted long after they’d landed, and that afternoon they drank their rum in silence.

The next morning, Paul woke to see Gaetan creep about in the shadows, before gently opening the door to leave.

Hey, said Paul. Wait.

You’re awake.

He’d thought Gaetan had just been leaving him to sleep, until he heard the guilt in his voice.

I’m coming with you, aren’t I?

Gaetan leant against the door and sighed.

No. It’s better you stay here. You’re like a zombie, man. I think you’re scaring away the fish. And that heavy weather! It’s like taking a woman to Saint Brandon. I don’t want any more bad luck out there. Go out for a walk today.

Gaetan lived nowhere, really. That was, the place where he lived had no name. It was a group of shacks and a shack-like shop off the side of the road between La Gaulette and Le Morne, not far from the mangrove swamps. Setting out later that morning, the rain having stopped and the wet road steaming in the sun, Paul found himself taking the Black River Coast road, drawn south to Le Morne, to the huge mass of rock which reared up from the end of the island’s southwestern peninsula.

Gaetan had been born in the shadow of this mountain. His family had lived in a village at its base, Trou Chenille. But the village was no longer there. It was a haunted mountain, Gaetan had told Paul. The mountain was riddled with caves and its rocky overhangs were not easily accessible, leading it to become a refuge for bands of runaway slaves, the
maron
. There were many myths about these fugitives – it was said they practised voodoo and killed any babies born
among them to stop their cries attracting soldiers. This wild place was haunted with spirits and at night their voices could be heard on the wind. If you looked up at the mountain, said Gaetan, who never did when he was out on the
pirog
, you could almost feel yourself being watched by spirits hidden in all those dark crevices.

Following the road round to the north shore of the peninsula, remembering all these stories, Paul felt his chest constrict. His breathing became shallow, as though he were climbing at altitude. He felt a kind of oppressiveness in the air but no wonder, he thought: the sun was strong and the air was damp with drying rain. It was not the mountain, he told himself, walking parallel to its base along the beach, heading towards the end of the peninsula. It was
not
. He decided on a swim. Wading into the water, he launched himself onto his back, then lost himself in the unhurried blue of the sky. It was hazy out at sea: Paul felt as though he were looking at the world through plate glass, but so closely that his breath was misting up the glass and the world was disappearing. Then it started to rain and the colours of the sky and the sea were softened and blurred like a watercolour.

It was as he was floating that he noticed the rock a little further out. A cross was erected on it. The site of a shipwreck, perhaps. Maybe even the wreck of the
Saint-Géran
, Virginie’s doomed ship. Had that sunk here? A gradual horror stole over Paul as he realised he might be swimming among the drowned, so he flipped over and front-crawled as fast as he could back to shore.

As he staggered out of the shallows, he saw that he was no longer alone on the beach. A man was approaching him. A
blan
with long, matted hair – dirty blond, the colour of damp sand. He was in his late forties, Paul guessed, as he came closer.

You’re a tourist? the man asked him.

Sort of. Paul no longer wondered how people knew. But the man’s own speech was hesitant, as though he himself were speaking in a language not his own.

See that? The man pointed out to the rock and the cross. Do you know why that’s there?

Paul shook his head.

To mark where the slaves drowned. Some of them threw themselves off this mountain rather than be caught. He squinted up at it. People drown here all the time. Trou Chenille, he said. Caterpillar Hole. It’s the name of the current.

How odd to map areas of sea, Paul thought. Like mapping the sky. Naming currents as you would constellations.

So no swimming here. The man smiled. You might drown. People come here to do that deliberately, you know. Is that why you’re here?

When the man looked at him closely, Paul was suddenly gripped with the sensory meltdown that made him confuse sand with stars, and he wondered why the man’s icy blue eyes weren’t running down his face, melting like tears in the heat.

Then the man laughed. He asked if Paul smoked
ganja
.

Paul nodded.

Good, said the man, and took out a pouch. His hands were spangled with salt and sand.

Trou Chenille, Paul said. There used to be a village here.

Yes, said the man. My family destroyed it.

Tell me, said Paul.

The people of that village, the man said, were Creole. They claimed to be the descendants of the
maron
. Some people say the
maron
are a myth. To prove the existence of a disappeared people, you point to the things they left behind. We, the living, know the dead by the things they cannot take
with them. But cooking pots, utensils… weapons… nothing like that has ever been found here. And so some people declare the
maron
never existed. But they were fugitives! Their aim was to leave no trace or they would have been caught. Their very invisibility proves their existence. Those who deny this are people who would prefer not to preserve the memory of slavery. People like my family. Some
blan
claimed the land of Trou Chenille and kicked the residents out. My family bought some of that land. This all happened a few years before I was born. I did not become aware of it until I was a young man, and when I learnt the true cost of my privilege I rejected it. I live in a little shack now, in that woodland behind you. But I was born on a large and beautiful estate near the Black River Gorge. My father was born there before me, as were his father and
his
father and grandfather, our forefather having come to Mauritius from Brittany. Of course you know the story of
Paul et Virginie.
The man who wrote it was inspired to do so when he came here from France in the late eighteenth century. And my grandfather’s great-great-great-grandfather travelled with the author, Saint-Pierre, on that very same ship from Lorient. It is odd when you read Saint-Pierre’s journals. He found Mauritius inhospitably rugged and yearned for the pastoral beauty of France. And yet
Paul et Virginie
is his hymn to this island, which he presents as a paradise, while he savages his homeland. A man between two worlds, as I feel myself to be. Like many of his countrymen, my Breton ancestor had not intended to stay in the colonies for long, but his fortunes had been amassed at such a rate that he found it impossible to leave. Eventually, over successive generations the family shifted from being French colonials to French Mauritians. They began to feel at home on the island. Their fortunes flourished through the exploitation and oppression of the other islanders. We made ours peddling poison. Poison of
the darkest kind, the whitest kind, which might as well be crystals of blood. Sugar! As a young man I left the island to study the chemical processing of sugar, which would enable my family to produce ever greater quantities of the stuff. But the place where I chose to study changed the course of my fate. I went to Brittany. As a child I had been told many stories about the place and I was fascinated by it. I was particularly obsessed with the story of the drowned island of Ker-Ys, fabled to be close to the Bay of Douarnenez, where my family had originated. Somewhere deep under the sea might lie an ancient island city! In 1965 I began my studies in Rennes and spent much of my free time travelling the region, surfing on the west coast, which I came to know intimately. It is a wild place and in many ways reminds me of Mauritius. Have you ever been to Souillac, down in the south of the island? Le Souffleur? No? It’s a rock in the sea which got its name from the whistling sound the waves used to make when they rushed through it. But the forces which shaped the rock in that way have eroded it further so that it is silent now as all rocks are, and eventually the rock itself will disappear, as all rocks eventually do. The sea there is wild. When I am there, I think of Finistère in Brittany, and whenever I was in Finistère I thought of Souillac.

Paul was suddenly aware of the shushing of the waves as they crept up on him and retreated. The man continued with his story.

I fell in love with Brittany, and then, towards the end of my studies, I fell in love with a Breton girl. Annick. She was a student of political science and an active member of an anarchist Breton liberationist party. Through my passion for Annick, and for Brittany, I found myself drawn into politics. Annick helped me to realise the true human cost of my
privilege. And then came May 1968. Listening to the news of the Paris riots on the wireless, I thought instantly of the drowned island of Ker-Ys, my childhood obsession. There’s a Breton legend that Paris was built in imitation of Ker-Ys (from
Par Ys
, ‘Like unto Ys’) and a proverb claims:
Pa vo beuzet Paris, ec’h adsavo Ker Is
(‘When Paris is swept away, Ker-Ys will re-emerge’). Revolution and the resurrection of a mythical island were linked in my mind. Of course that was also the year that Mauritius gained her independence. I came to realise that my struggle was here. And so I left Annick, and Brittany, to return. There is not much else to tell. I got involved with a militant workers’ movement here and fell foul of hardliners who were suspicious of me as a
blan
and a member of the ruling class. No matter that I had cut myself off from my family and their money! I was expelled from the party. Suddenly I was adrift. Afloat between two worlds. Once again sugar turned to poison in my life, but this time it was brown, and I found myself addicted. I broke free of that by coming here. I climbed up into one of those caves up there. I lay there sweating and hallucinating for seven days and seven nights. And, after that, I awoke. Free. But trapped. You remember those books from one’s childhood whose young heroes pass freely between the worlds of reality and magic? They snap their fingers or climb into paintings and pass instantly into another realm. Then they reach adolescence and are trapped. Trapped in their own world. The realm of magic still exists, but they can no longer reach it. This is how I have felt all my adult life. I am stuck between two worlds. Or trapped in one and no longer able to access the one I long for. It is why I live here, on this haunted rock, not quite on land and not quite at sea.