Read Online The Prospector by J.M.G Le Clézio - Free Book Online Page B

is dazzling me and dulling all others. My father talks for a long time that afternoon, pacing around the narrow room, picking up papers and looking at them, then laying them back down without even showing me, while I remain standing still near his table, looking furtively at the map of Rodrigues Island stuck on the wall next to the map of the night sky. Maybe that’s why, later, I will always feel as if everything that happened after that, the adventure, the quest, took place in ethereal lands, not down on the real earth, as if my journey aboard the Argo had already begun.

    These are the last days of summer and they seem very long, filled with so many events at all times of the day or night: they’re more like months or years, deeply changing the world around us and leaving us aged. Heatwave days when the air is dense, heavy and liquid down in the Tamarin Valley and one feels a prisoner of the circus of mountains. Beyond, the sky is clear, restless, the clouds scud along in the wind, their shadows hurrying over the burned hills. The last of the harvesting will soon be over and there are angry rumblings among the field labourers because they have nothing left to eat. Sometimes in the evening I see the red smoke of fires in the cane fields, then the sky turns a strange colour, a glaring, ominous red that hurts your eyes and makes your throat tighten. In spite of the danger I walk through the fields almost every day to see the fires. I go out as far as Yemen, sometimes as far as Tamarin Estate, or make my way up towards Magenta and Belle Rive. From high up on the Tourelle I see other clouds of smoke rising in the north over by Clarence or Marcenay on the outskirts of Wolmar. Now I’m alone. Ever since the journey in the pirogue my father has forbidden me to see Denis. He doesn’t come to Boucan any more. Laure says she heard Denis’s grandfather, Capt’n Cook, shouting at him, because Denis came to see him in spite of the restriction. Since then he’s disappeared. It has made me feel as if there is an emptiness, a great solitude here, as if my parents, Laure and I are Boucan’s last inhabitants.
    So I wander out very far, farther and farther. I climb to the top of the high Creole walls and search for the smoke of the revolts. I run through the fields, devastated from the harvests. There are still labourers in places, very poor, old women dressed in gunny cloth, gleaning or cutting the couch grass with their sickles. When they see me, my face tanned and clothes stained with red earth, barefoot and carrying my shoes slung around my neck, they shout at me to drive me away, because they’re afraid. No white person ever comes out this far. Sometimes the sirdars also insult me and throw stones and I run through the cane until I’m out of breath. I hate the sirdars. I despise them more than anything in the world, because they are unfeeling and cruel, and because they beat the poor people with sticks when the bundles of cane don’t reach the cart fast enough. But in the evening they get paid double and then get drunk on arak. They’re cowardly and obsequious with the field managers, they take off their caps when they speak to them and feign being fond of the people they’ve just mistreated. There are men in the fields who are almost naked, covered only with a tattered piece of cloth, pulling out the cane stubble with heavy iron pincers that are called ‘ macchabée s ’. They carry blocks of basalt over to the ox cart on their shoulders, then go and pile them up at the end of the field, making new pyramids. They are the people Mam calls ‘the martyrs of the cane’. They sing as they work and I really like hearing their monotone voices in the lonely expanse of the plantations as I’m sitting up on top of a black pyramid. Just for myself I like to sing the old Creole song Capt’n Cook used to sing to Laure and me when we were very small, the one that goes:
Mo