As for my mother, she was full of imagination and charm. We loved her, and I suppose our mischievousness made her laugh. I don’t remember having ever heard her raise her voice. Consequently, we had carte blanche to establish a reign of infantile terror in the small apartment. In the years that preceded our departure for Africa we did things that, with the hindsight of age, actually seem pretty awful to me: one day, goaded on by my brother, I scaled the railing of the balcony (I can still see it, quite a bit over my head) to climb up on the gutter overlooking the whole neighborhood from six floors up. I think my mother and grandparents were so frightened that — once we’d consented to come back in — they forgot to punish us.
I also remember being seized with temper tantrums because I’d been refused something, a sweet, a toy — in a word, for such trivial reasons I can’t even remember them. I would be filled with so much anger I would throw whatever I could get my hands on out the window, even furniture. At times like that, nothing and no one could calm me down. Sometimes I can call up the feelings of those fits of rage, I believe it’s something similar to being inebriated on ether (ether was given to children to inhale before extracting their tonsils). The complete loss of control, that feeling of floating, and at the same time of being extremely lucid. It was back in the days when I was also subject to violent headaches sometimes so unbearable that I had to hide under the furniture to escape the light. Where did those attacks come from? Today it seems to me that the only explanation would be the anxiety of the war years. A closed, dark, hopeless world. The wretched food — the black bread that people said was mixed with sawdust, and that almost caused my death at the age of three. The bombing of the harbor in Nice that flung me to the floor of my grandmother’s bathroom, that unforgettable feeling of the floor falling out from under my feet. Or still yet the ulcer on my grandmother’s leg, which had grown worse with the shortages and the lack of medicine; I’m in the mountain village where my mother has gone to hide due to my father being in the British army and the risk of her being deported. We are standing in line in front of the food store and I’m watching the flies alighting on the open wound on my grandmother’s leg.
The journey to Africa brought all of that to an end. One radical change: upon instructions from my father, before departing, I was to cut my hair — which I had worn long until then, after the fashion of young boys from Brittany — which resulted in my getting an extraordinarily bad case of sunburn on my ears, and my being forced to enter the ranks of male normality. Never again did I have those horrendous migraines, never again would I be able to give free reign to the temper tantrums of my early childhood. To me, arriving in Africa meant entering the antechamber of the adult world.
* On the northern coast of South America (1814–1966), now Guyana.
FROM GEORGETOWN TO VICTORIA
AT THIRTY YEARS of age, my father left Southampton aboard a mixed cargo headed for Georgetown, in British Guiana. The rare pictures of him at the time depict a robust, athletic-looking man, elegantly dressed in a suit, a stiff-collared shirt, tie, vest, black leather shoes. It had been almost eight years since he’d left Mauritius, after that fatal day in 1919 when his family had been evicted from the house in which he was born. In the small notebook where he’d jotted down the main events of the last days spent at Moka, he wrote: “I have only one desire now, to go far away from here and never to return.” British Guiana was in fact on the other side of the world, diametrically opposite to Mauritius.
Did the tragedy of Moka justify his going to such a remote place? At the time of his departure, he was undoubtedly filled with such determination that it remained with him all of his life. He couldn’t be like other people. He couldn’t forget. He never spoke of the events which had led to the dispersion of all of the members of his family. Except every now and again, just to let out a burst of anger.
For seven years he studied in London, first in an engineering school, then in medical school. His family had been ruined, and he had to rely entirely on a government grant. He couldn’t afford to fail. He specialized in tropical medicine. He already knew he wouldn’t have the means to set himself up in a private practice. The episode of the calling card that the head doctor of the Southampton hospital had demanded was only a pretext for cutting off ties with European society.
At the time, the only pleasurable thing in his life was going to see his uncle in Paris, the passion he felt for his first cousin, my mother. The vacations he spent in France with them were an imaginary return to a past which no longer existed. My father was born in the same house as his uncle, they had grown up there each in turn, they were familiar with the same places, they had known the same secrets, the same hiding places, gone swimming in the same stream. My mother had never lived there (she was born in Milly), but she had always heard her father speak of it, it was part of her past, it felt like an inaccessible yet familiar dream to her (for back then, Mauritius was so far away, one could only dream of it). She and my father were united by that dream, they were drawn to one another as are exiles from an inaccessible land.
No matter. My father had decided to go away, he would go away. The Colonial Office assigned him to be a doctor on the rivers of Guiana. As soon as he arrived, he chartered a pirogue with a roof of palm leaves, propelled by a long-axle Ford motor. Aboard his pirogue, in the company of his team, nurses, pilot, guide and interpreter, he sailed up the rivers: the Mazaruni, the Essequeibo, the Kupurung, the Demerara.
He took pictures. With his Leica Bellows camera, he collected black-and-white snapshots that depicted, better than any words, the remoteness of the post, the enthusiasm he felt at discovering the new world. Tropical nature was not new to him. In Mauritius, in the ravines under the bridge in Moka, the Terre-Rouge River was no different from what he found upstream on the rivers in Guiana. But that country was immense, it didn’t belong to human beings quite yet. His pictures show loneliness, abnegation, the feeling of having reached the most distant shore in the world. From the wharf at Berbice he photographed the dark sheet of water over which a pirogue is gliding past a village of sheet metal scattered with scraggly trees. His house — a sort of chalet of planks on stilts, on the edge of an empty road, flanked by an absurd lone palm tree. Or else the city of Georgetown, silent and slumbering in the heat, white houses with shutters closed against the sun, encircled by those same palm trees, haunting emblems of the tropics.
The pictures my father liked to take were those that showed the interior of the continent, the incredible power of the rapids his pirogue had to bypass, being hauled up on logs alongside the tiered rocks where the water cascades down between the dark walls of the forest on either bank.
Kaburi Falls, on the Mazaruni, the Kamakusa hospital, the wooden houses along the river, the shops of diamond hunters. A sudden calm on an arm of the Mazaruni, a sparkling mirror of water that sweeps you away into a dream. In the photo, the stem of the pirogue can be seen floating down the river. I look at it and can feel the wind, smell the water, despite the rumbling of the motor, I can hear the unbroken whirr of insects in the forest, can feel the anxiety springing from the coming of night. At the mouth of Rio Demerara, the hoists are loading Demerara sugar onto rusty cargo ships. And on a beach, where the wash comes rippling up to die, two Indian children gaze out at me, a small boy of around six and his sister hardly any older than he is, both with bellies distended from parasites, their black hair in a “bowl cut” just over their eyebrows like mine at their age. From his stay in Guiana, my father brought back only the memory of those two Indian children standing at the edge of the river, watching him, grimacing a little from the sun. And the images of a still wild world that he glimpsed along the rivers. A mysterious and fragile world ruled by sickness, fear, the violence of gold prospectors and treasure hunters, one in which the despairing chant of the vanishing Amerindian world could be heard. If they are still alive, what has become of that boy and girl? They must be very elderly, near the end of their lives.