Over Seas of Memory Read online

  These people were adventurers, Outre-mer in the French phrase, or people from the overseas regions. They came from faraway places, from India or Africa, Europe or even China. You could say they came from even farther away on the spur of their desires and dreams: they came from forever; they left for everywhere. They were explorers, romantics. They could read maps and hearts, wield their sex as well as their sextants. Inclined to free morals and free thinking, they switched in the space of a few years their country, their religion, their state and fortune. They remained, however, true to themselves through their trials and tribulations; they were masters of ducking and diving, experts in the art of navigation.

  Descendants of slaves or free men, runaway Africans, indentured Indians, banished Chinese, exiled Arabs, excommunicated Jews, expatriated Europeans, displaced Greeks, dispersed islanders, they had long known that origins mean nothing and have no more worth or meaning than a chestnut stuck in its husk or a manuscript that stays rolled up in its case. At the same time, they retained the memory of their origins—in the form of scars or else as sweet souvenirs—and carried it proudly on the open seas.

  Here are three of those people, now, before me. Three tombs, three persons, three islands. The grave on the left is the farthest from the path. It is the only one with a name, that of Maxime Ferrier, engraved on a copper leaf at the foot of the cross:

  MAXIME FERRIER

  (1905–1972)

  The grave on the right is that of Arthur Dai Zong, whose name is not on the stele but is found written in the register at the entrance to the cemetery. The name is broken down thus, in Chinese characters:

  阿手 (Ha Chou, or Arthur), 岱宗 (Dai Zong). It is a strange signature, and we have not yet understood all that it has to say.

  As for the last tomb, in the center, it has no distinctive marks. No date, no name: and yet it is this one that has taken me here.

  Farther ahead on the right lie soldiers from the colonial expedition led by France in 1895 and, a bit farther still, British soldiers from the capture of Mahajanga in 1942. The French dead are entitled to a monument, “to the memory of the soldiers and indigenous auxiliaries who died in the service of France.” The British dead are entitled to nothing. It is, however, they, here as elsewhere, who were more or less alone in standing up to the French troops of the Vichy government, on this island where the stakes were as much strategic as symbolic as, from the nineteenth century on, fervent anti-Semites, dreaming of yellow stars on the Red Island, had thought of it as a place of deportation for the Jews of Europe.

  Land of slavery and colony, land of exile and relegation: in the humble cemetery of the Corniche, memories do not so much tear each other apart; rather, they reinforce each other. They are not muted by pain, but neither do they talk much; they do not question each other, they don’t chat away their misery. They know that each time a tomb disappears, it is the whole cemetery that is damaged.

  *

  The breeze picks up. The trade winds blow in from the open sea, and the three tombs seem now like three frigates in battle formation, accompanied by the cries of sea gulls and the murmuring of the rain. Time accelerates and returns to its source. On each of the tombs I can track time’s displacement volume, as it were, passing from green to blue and from blue to gold. I see the hatchings and the contours, the slices and the grooves—the immense embroidery of time into which death sometimes weaves a little piece of black velvet.

  I hear the sounds of crossings and great migrations, the enormous passing fancy of the current and the everyday, the journeys, the wanderings carried on the arms of the sea and the shoulders of the wind. I listen. What I hear is a musical score of rocks and foliage, of Indian cloth and British candies, a music so incredibly light—the acrobatics of butterflies, forests, and voices superimposed on each other.

  All that remains for me now is to follow them. I make my way down the road that falls gently to the sea. I have scribbled in my spiral notebook the few words inscribed on Maxime’s tomb. Under his name, in italics, an epitaph scrawled in the form of a Malagasy inscription in the stone:

  Ho velona fa tsy ho levona

  It is a strange phrase, which I will understand more fully only later on. It plays on two words that echo each other and that reverberate endlessly the similarity of their three syllables, velona (living) and levona (destroyed). All that the following story tells, all that it says of life, is there in those few syllables, in their delicate shifting, in the unfurling of this little phrase in a foreign language and what it signifies:

  So that it be living and not destroyed

  A Man Leaving

  I have had some trouble finding the trail of Maxime Ferrier. That is no real surprise, as he did everything he could to cover his tracks. We are in November 1922; the International Court of Justice has just been set up in The Hague. In Genoa the basic principles of the Gold Exchange Standard have just been defined: the U.S. dollar is indexed against gold, while the rest of the indexed currencies are set against the dollar. In Russia, Stalin is elected general secretary of the Communist Party before signing, at the very end of the year, the treaty that founds the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. In Stockholm, Einstein receives his Nobel Prize for physics, which was awarded to him the previous year, “for his audacious hypothesis on the corpuscular nature of light.” He will be succeeded by Niels Bohr, for his work on the structure of the atom. In one year, all the elements of the twentieth century are put in place, with their various tones and colors, their explosive force and their contradictions.

  In France the first stone of the Paris Mosque is laid, while in Marseille a colonial exhibition begins. In the Netherlands the new Constitution suppresses the word colonies in favor of overseas territories, but the Indonesians remain Dutch “subjects” . . . There are some years like that, which seem like whole centuries, moments where everything speeds up and condenses, a kind of temporal crest where things take their thread, their shape, their speed, their clearest curvature. Suddenly, itineraries and routes are sketched out, affirmed, refined; everything rises up and becomes knotted together in the blink of an eye. The past, the present, and the future come together as one: it is like the grand finale of all the centuries revealed in a few days. Soon that whole sense of things coming together is going to be lost again, disappear, and fall apart . . . The end of clear sight. But for the moment, it is there, and I grasp the cogs, the gears, and see how it is all connected.

  The same year, in Paris, ironically detached from the century’s great clamor, Sylvia Beach publishes Joyce’s Ulysses. An Irishman in his bewildering style suddenly revisits all the myths of Greece. In Egypt, at the end of a set of stairs dug out of the rock and down a little sloping corridor, Howard Carter and Lord Caernarvon discover the tomb of Tutankhamun, hidden behind a varnished door covered in the seals of the royal necropolis and defended by two statues of black sentinels that symbolize the hope for resurrection. In November this resurrection takes place, though no doubt not in the way the Egyptians had wished for: brought out again into the open air were toys and games, chairs, stools and beds, wine jars—a whole little mass of objects and practices—as well as aristocratic missiles, such as bows, arrows, and boomerangs.

  In the funeral chamber they find thirty-five model boats and a statue of Anubis, a god with the head of a black dog and an enigmatic smile: he has a key in his hand, and around his neck hangs a cornflower necklace. The walls are painted with scenes representing the ritual of the “opening of the mouth” and the solar ship on which is taken the journey to the beyond. To windward there are the mummies: the reopened echo chamber vibrates once again. At the same time, as if he had heard of the discovery, Marcel Proust (who, in the first pages of In Search of Lost Time evokes in passing the spinning mystery of metempsychosis) dies in his cork-floored bedroom, after a long-running dispute with death. “Dead forever? Who can say?”

  Maxime Ferrier knows nothing of all this. But certain people are like that; they can sense what is in the wind
, smell the messages of the time, decode its signals. Something inside warned him that he would have to leave, depart the family circle and enter the crucible of exodus. He had to leave, run off, slip away, leave behind the notions of inside and outside, become as foreign as possible: nothing or no one could stop him.

  He will show it many times from this point: Maxime has the nervous system of a cat, a particular interior disposition—a vegetal inflorescence, a cavernous body, a tactical sense—an ear particularly attuned to the vibrations around him, all that one describes normally in terms of intuition and that is in fact an extraordinary sensitivity to the waves of time. He is a fluid, a feline or a wolf, a body radar. From that basic state all the rest joins up as in a chain: journeys, encounters, projects, disasters, the fragile happiness of being alive, but everything will have been thought of from that original state or condition, from this sensitive body and its fine tunings, like a gigantic interior map indicating ways of thinking and, according to circumstances, the attitude to take.

  Now the boat turns off toward the west coast of Madagascar. It is a little cargo boat loaded with rations, men, animals, and flowers: it is called L’Étoile, or The Star. The inventory that I have been able to find gives a fairly precise idea of its cargo: sugar, textiles, clothes, spices, perfumes, herbs, gold and rock crystal, Bombay flour . . . In another document are also listed dates, camel butter, furniture, and carved doors—the strange commotion of the world.

  The crew is multilingual, men who can do a bit of everything in the powerful and deliberate disorder of the sea. On board you hear French, Malagasy, Mauritian Creole, Reunionese Creole, English, Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Chinese, and Italian . . . In which language do they communicate? French, for the most part. A French flavored with several other languages, open, fluid, undulating, but formidably precise, not the flat and hardened language that they now want us to have as the only one possible. They say, for example, “Alors, vous aussi, vous avez sauté la mer?” Which means literally—today it has to be translated—that you have “jumped the sea,” or in other words, that you have left your country. And one cannot forget the universal language of smiles, threats, chants, and gestures.

  It is a timeless opera. Human exchanges have been taking place on the Indian Ocean longer than on any other maritime space—for more than five thousand years it has been so, while such exchanges have existed on the Atlantic Ocean for five hundred years and on the Pacific two thousand. The Comoros, the Seychelles, the Maldives, the Mascarenes: a whole network of islands of varying sizes and diverse populations. Since the dawn of time, people have been exchanging here looks, glances, and words; currencies circulate, ambitions come face-to-face, rules and rituals are imported and exported—contracts, returns, compensations. Traditions are swapped and beliefs passed on. Men with Spanish grammar, crazy travelers, Hottentots, Ngunis, Malagasy, Senegalese, a whole world of faces and voices, coming from India, Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle Kingdom, and the Land of the Rising Sun, all of this shifts around on the rippling sea, in the rolling currents and the sliding wind.

  This particular cargo boat is all the more singular: it is carrying two special loads that give it a slightly crazy yet poetic allure. First of all, there are whole armfuls of flowers, cut or in pots, mostly orchids, vanillas, vandas, cattleyas, carefully placed on the deck so that they encircle it with their perfumes. Waiting already at the quay is Hassan Ali, the region’s big landowner. This man is mad about flowers. It is not by chance that he settled in this town: Mahajanga is one of the most important cities in the west of Madagascar. Situated on the Virgin Islands coast, people call it “the city of flowers,” and you see bunches, bouquets, and sprays from Africa, Arabia, and Asia arranged on the Quai aux Boutres.

  All seems calm on the boat as it sails toward the town. But in the ship’s hold there is stowed away another, strange cargo. Under the waterline, in a dark stench of wild cats, pieces of folded blue cloth sit beside steel rods, ropes, and hoops. The smell catches your throat as you approach the cages, while your ears fill up with growling sounds, murmurs, and grunts. The piercing cries of monkeys; birdsong in the commotion of the seas . . . Your eyes get used to the darkness, and you discover a speckled and growling gathering, like the reverse of the fragrances on the deck: there are panthers from Asia, leopards from Africa, jaguars from the Americas, a whole population confused and churned up by the movements of the sea. Huge tiger heads roll across the wood.

  In a corner there is a red-and-gold sign with the words, in glittering letters: Cirque Bartolini, the Bartolini Circus. Madame Bartolini is a strong woman who has made her fortune in the transportation of rare plants and stunning shows and spectacles: the Snake-Man, the Woman with Two Heads, the Rat-Child, and the Spider-Man. In this fairground troupe there is also, for contrast, a Hercules, a Cleopatra, and even—you can’t have too much of a good thing—two Venuses: the “Venus of the Morning” and the “Venus of the Evening,” two sisters with graceful features and impeccable bodies. The captain’s journal tells us that during the crossing, a lioness gave birth to a cub: life is transmitted amid the absurdity and disorder of this journey.

  Maxime travels without papers, with almost no money, and without the slightest worry. He is equally at ease with the flowers as with the monsters. At his age, and in his situation, he does not have the right to enter Madagascar, and he knows it. He grasped the opportunity offered by the circus to leave Mauritius in the most perfectly clandestine way: young, flexible, subtle, muscular, and slender, he didn’t pass up on the chance to join the traveling circus. Madame Bartolini’s eagle eye spotted immediately the potential of this young man and his “strange little body.” Maxime has what they call in French “la caisse,” that is, a highly powerful thorax supported by two long and slender legs, like a safe balancing on two matchsticks . . . “The ideal physique for an acrobat,” notes Madame Bartolini in one of her journals at the end of his recruitment interview. “This funny body gives him at once power and fluidity,” she adds in her fine, slanting handwriting, and ends by saying: “Enormous rib cage and suppleness of the limbs: he can do everything, tumble, turn, climb, perform sequences of movements, and manipulate at different speeds, moving forward with poise and balance. Excellent grip on the apparatus.”

  While waiting to dock, the acrobat looks at the approaching shore. I imagine him surrounded by his many companions, as they are described in the circus program:

  The man who walks with his hands as he has no legs.

  The woman who eats with her feet as she has no arms.

  The skeleton-man who is the husband of the bearded woman.

  The Aztecs with the pointed skulls.

  The sword swallower and the knife thrower.

  Each one of them has a particular body, a body that is unique in the world, a body that speaks and does tricks. Max’s body is no less strange than the others, with his huge chest and his two slender legs, but in the only full-length photo we have of him at this time, he gives off a great sense of elegance in this very singular body: his white shirt, his flannel or white cotton pants, his little brown handmade hat. He is very well dressed but seems to be mocking his clothes in a way. His head is turned toward the sea, slightly in profile; you see a foot in a moccasin resting on the ship’s rail. The open air blows all around this great body. If you did not know you were dealing with an acrobat, you would easily guess it: his balance is perfect; the point of his shoe is raised toward the sky. What is he thinking of at this moment? No one could say, but everything in his look and the way he holds himself suggests that he is happy.

  All around him there are more flowers, a real delight of stems and stalks, branches and bulbs, leaves and fruits: behind the line of his shoulders, you can make out stumps and grafts, cuttings, roots and runners, small branches with buds on them. It is as if Maxime had become a flower himself, a strange and vegetal being, indifferent to the chaos of the world and growing as of that moment according to his own laws. Farther behind, in the dark part of the photo,
there is a faint ribbon of sea-foam that rises right up to me and that I must follow now, a smell or a shadow, a vestige, a way, a path, barely a mist of footstep sounds.

  *

  Paris, on the rue du Fer-à-Moulin, I open a book . . .

  It is authored by two delicious-sounding names: Kumari R. Issur and Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing. I like that solitary letter, planted right in the middle of the name, inserted between the first name and the family name. There is something that slides there, a pause, an accent . . . that rings differently . . . a possibility of syncopation.

  I read aloud: “Since the sixteenth century authors have written in and about the Indian Ocean in French: travel writing, back-to-nature tales, utopias, fantastical works in every genre, and then you have exotic poetry, colonial novels, and finally indigenous literature and exiled writing. This rich and varied literary production remains largely unknown.”

  I could not have put it better. Poets and novelists from the Mascarenes? Forget it. Malcom de Chazal, the “extraordinary poetic meteor,” adored by André Breton? Not so much . . . Rabearivelo and Rabemananjara? Come on, how do you even pronounce them?

  Ah, France and its memory . . . Its memories, should I say: the complexity of memories, their torment, and their turbulence . . . It is very difficult to speak in France of anything other than France itself. And even then, it is a certain kind of France . . . It’s not easy to get people to admit that France is more than metropolitan France—the Hexagon, as they call it.

  This afternoon I saw Xavier to let him know I was leaving . . . Xavier is a friend, a writer, very well-known in Parisian circles. Blond and tanned, he has just come back from a literary festival in Corrèze, in southwestern France. It was the height of exoticism for him . . . A phrase comes to mind: “They think they are happy because they are immobile.”