Over Seas of Memory Read online

We were at the corner of the rue Bonaparte and the rue Jacob, the Pré-aux-clercs . . . Hemingway used to go there often, as did Breton, Bataille, and many others. A memory of place . . .

  — But what are you going to do in Madagascar? A whole month at the end of the world!

  — My grandfather’s grave is there.

  — Ah, I see, a family novel.

  — No, it’s not that . . . It’s more like . . . how can I put it? An important anniversary, a happy one. We climb back into time but also descend it; we cross it and take it up again . . .

  — Ah, okay? But, all the same, a return to your roots!

  — Not at all.

  — An exotic novel?

  — No, in fact it’s the very opposite. Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Indian Ocean are integral parts of the history of France: you cannot understand France if you don’t include those places and a few others as well. You have there generations of men and women thrown upon the seas and who, some years later, would give birth to French people like me and you.

  — How come, these three acrobats, what do they have to do with the history of France?

  — Everything! It’s all tied up together! I could show you. You will see . . . France, its history and origins, come from afar.

  He raises his eyes to the sky. I see him balking at the idea, disagreeing . . . But here comes my friend Li-An, who arrives at just the right moment, with her mischievous, sweet face, tall and slender with black hair down to her hips, a living appeal for the crossing of cultures. Straightaway we speak a little in English, we switch, she agrees with me, we have him in a sandwich between two or three languages . . . Li-An is an épéeist, a member of the Chinese Olympic fencing team, and it’s for that reason she is in Paris, for a tournament in Bercy. She starts up again, flirting and jousting with him!

  — Yes, yes, she says in English, it is very difficult to speak in France about anything other than France.

  — and yet, to understand France, it is necessary to include other countries. You have to look elsewhere to understand what France really is . . .

  — Other countries, yes, yes, she says in English. There is a drastic memory loss regarding certain subjects: no more memory, no more memory . . . she says, again in English. Xavier is now in agreement with virtually everything. His eyes are on Li-An’s legs . . .

  We stood jousting there, reinventing the place, to the west of St. Germain Abbey and its old town . . . Li-Ann has to go to her training session; she leaves, leaving in her wake a final smile and a faint smell of flowers. Xavier looks a bit disappointed that she cannot stay any longer. I feel that he is ready to be even more profoundly convinced now! He flicks through a literary magazine absent-mindedly . . . I have a drink of my Perrier and turn my head gently toward the sun.

  *

  In Paris I live on the rue du Fer-à-Moulin.

  Formerly, it was the rue des Morts, the Street of the Dead. It was known as such, for there, right below my window, stood for a long time the Clamart cemetery. Few people know about it: it was the biggest cemetery in Paris. It has nothing to do with the suburb that now has the same name: it is found at the site of the old gardens of the Hôtel de Clamart, the property of the lords of Clamart, near the former place Poliveau, just next to the Jardin des Plantes.

  The history of France interests me. Almost forgotten today, this cemetery was famous for having received the remains of those condemned to death and, in particular, those guillotined during the Revolution. Mirabeau himself, when his body was removed from the Pantheon, was thrown into the Clamart cemetery: his remains have never been found. On the rue de la Clef stood the Sainte-Pélagie prison, where many singers (Bruant, Béranger), rogues, and poets were locked up . . . Everyone who thought a bit freely ended up spending time in the prison: Daumier spent six months there, for his caricatures; Nerval spent a few days, for causing a row at night. The Marquis de Sade was also there, and this was for him his final stay in prison before going to the Charenton asylum. Madame Roland, a reader of Montesquieu and Voltaire and the muse of the Girondists, spent some time in the prison (“I, the only woman in this jail! How horrific and what an honor”)—just before they cut her head off.

  There is a whole nation of the dead under there. And it is from there that I am writing to you.

  The Clamart cemetery was the graveyard for poor people, those who could not afford the Cemetery of the Innocents. There was no money to pay for the wood for the coffin, so they stitched the dead into an old piece of cloth and threw them into a cart, before taking them to the communal graves. Louis-Sébastien Mercier describes the scene in his Tableau de Paris: “The bodies that the Hôtel-Dieu vomits out on a daily basis are taken to Clamart. It is a vast cemetery, where the burial pit is always open . . . This lugubrious cart leaves every day from the Hôtel-Dieu at four o’clock in the morning: it trundles along in the silence of the night. The bell that precedes it wakes up all who are sleeping along its route; you have to be there on the route to really sense all that the noise of the carriage inspires and the full effect that it has on the soul. People have seen it, at certain times of high mortality, pass by up to four times in a day: it can hold up to fifty bodies. People put their children between the legs of adults. The bodies are thrown into a wide and deep pit; then they throw in some quicklime; and this crucible that never closes says to the horrified eye that it would devour without any difficulty all the inhabitants of the capital.”

  The memory is a muscle; if it is not used, it wastes away. That is why I am looking to retrace the path of Maxime Ferrier. Maxime, my grandfather, the acrobat . . . In my family everybody knows the crazy story of this man, who left his native island, Mauritius, at the age of seventeen, joined a circus as an acrobat, and made his fortune in Madagascar, before losing everything because of the war, under mysterious circumstances.

  I met Maxime when I was a child. But the only memories of him that I retain are very confused. I remember a tired old man, just before his death, while in the photos I have found or the newspaper articles that tell of his spectacular rise and no-less-brutal fall, he is a young man that appears very dynamic, almost scarily so. It is to fill in the gap between these two images that I have set out on his trail.

  There is something else: before dying, Maxime had three tombs made in the Mahajanga cemetery, a town in the northwest of Madagascar, where he rests now. Three white tombs that are almost perfectly identical. The first was made for his friend Arthur Dai Zong, a Chinese man who had for some time been his partner in the most breathtaking acrobatic duo in all the Indian Ocean. The second was for him, Maxime. But the third tomb, who is buried there? No one knows. And what is the meaning of the strange epitaph that is affixed to the tomb?

  So that it may be living and not destroyed.

  At this point I have no idea what it means.

  However, this is not just a matter of a familial pilgrimage. This evening the television is showing over and again the results of the latest elections. The “political leaders” appear one after the other: there are too many taxes, there is too much unemployment, not enough competitiveness, growing insecurity, an irresponsible judiciary, rampant immigration, state handouts at the expense of the taxpayer, it’s all going on . . . What follows is a game of one-upmanship over who is the most French, the best French . . . Exclusion, homogenization, reorganization . . . People need to be taught again to become French, to think French, to buy French. How many of us these last few months, with ancestors of foreign origin and confronted with the delirium of today’s France, how many of us have not asked ourselves if our ancestors could become French today like they were able to before? Li-An is right: it is very difficult in France today to speak of anything other than France. I say it again: to understand France, you have to pass through other countries, journey through other histories.

  In particular, you would have to know more about the generations of men and women thrown upon the seas and who, some years later, would give birth to French people like you and me. Can we
reconnect the chain of time? Do we have to reunify French history in a sort of grand narrative, which would go well beyond a simple family saga? Or else is there another way of paying homage to this mobile multiplicity of people and letting it speak? And what would literature be if it did not give voice to the silences of history?

  By a happy set of circumstances, it was my turn to have a sabbatical from the university: I jumped at the chance and decided to set out on the trail of Maxime. Now, on the terrace of 24 rue du Fer-à-Moulin, directly opposite the square Théodore-Monod, that magnificent wanderer . . . October blows in. I have written all night, it is four in the morning: on the right is the Hôtel Scipion, the only hotel in Paris that dates back to the Middle Ages. Underneath: the dead. “The dead, the poor dead, know great pain,” wrote Baudelaire. They call to me. I return, pick up my pen, and write—unseen, I board the nightly cart of the dead.

  *

  We have never known exactly why Maxime set out to sea and signed up for the Bartolini Circus to get to Madagascar. The craziest hypotheses circulate on this subject. A story of love gone wrong? Family problems? But no . . . Snippets from newspapers, fragments of letters, a few oral testimonies, tell us that he left behind him a loving mother, who looked always for ways to see him again, and a young fiancée with the wonderful name of Jeanne Wilhelmine Bhujoharry, who wrote to him deeply moving letters right to the end of her life. Nothing would make him come back.

  There is no trace of his father; it is as if he had also fled. We know only that he was a sailor. He recognized his son (you can still see the birth certificate at the town hall in Souillac, Mauritius), and then he took again to the sea. From that point no one knows anything else about him. It is tempting to wonder whether Maxime’s act was a repetition of the father’s own traumatic and essential act of abandonment, but I don’t believe that at all. The modern way of thinking is so standardized, so impoverished by the procession of banal nonsense on TV, that people turn instantly to this kind of mechanical causality, as if the little familial psychological issue or the immense sentimental blanket of love and relationships could explain everything.

  So, was it a desire for adventure? To try his chance, seek his fortune? Yes, of course . . . At the start of the century important gold mines were discovered on the Big Island, and after that all the adventurers in the region made their way to Madagascar: penniless Creoles from Mauritius and Réunion, Indians, Europeans, Chinese, people from the Comoros . . . The South and its high plateaus are full of gold-bearing quartz, manganese, platinum, and iron. The first oil discoveries were in 1911; numerous drillings revealed the presence of hydrocarbons all along the west coast. In the north there were the precious woods of the Antalaha region: specialists knew already about Madagascan ebony, which was—many forget this—the variety most used in French furniture of the seventeenth century, but they discovered also the immense reserves of rosewood, with its characteristic red and deep-black grained look, that was to gradually become one of the best wood varieties in the world for tuning pegs for violins, violas, and cellos. Great musicians knew this, and today still you only have to spend a few days there to hear it, that is, to understand it through the ear and the vibrations of footsteps on the land: Madagascar is an immense continent of sounds and songs. A hidden poem of timbres and tones whispers in its savannas and forests; it is a great musical storehouse for the whole world.

  On the high plateaus the farming of silkworms was developing, an industry in which many invested great hopes. “Silkworm farming has a big future in Emyrne. Mulberry trees grow well there, and the Madagascan people, none too keen on heavy work, will find there a job suited to their easygoing ways,” wrote a contemporary administrator. It is written there, in the book Colonies françaises, published by a big French publishing house in 1906, penned by “a set of writers, explorers, and administrators,” a work supported financially by the French Ministry for Education and Fine Arts, the City of Paris, etc., with that parting shot on the indolence of the Madagascan people, in the instantly recognizable style of the colonizer.

  Finally, following the discovery of high-quality rubellite in the Sahatany Valley, the word spread that the whole island is covered in gemstones: amethyst, garnet, topaz, striped sapphires nestling in the peaty boglands, sparkling rubies in the turbulent riverbeds. The Times correspondent of that period, a certain Mr. Knight, spoke of a “Madagascar boom”: hundreds of thousands of coconut trees were planted at Analava, facing the island of Nosy Be. To think of a hundred thousand coconut trees waiting for him, in their happy ecstasy, with their heads so green and full, must have thrown Maxime into a wonderful sense of excitement and anticipation.

  But can we ever really know why people leave? It is a banal question, normally the first one you ask of exiles whom you meet. The replies can be varied, by turns precise, succinct, or evasive, but they never get to the bottom of the enigma of leaving. From there a whole societal interpretative industry is set in motion, like the cogs and wheels of a machine. People get suspicious, they smell a rat, they guess, not letting it go, and where necessary, they make things up . . . they try to read the situation and surmise. They try to reconnect the chain of places and the precise number of links, to feel like they understand; they seek to uncover ruses and discover reasons, to untangle any contradictions.

  In her film Mémoires d’immigrés Yamina Benguigui—whose parents, Kabylian people of Algerian origin, emigrated to France in the 1950s—also poses this nagging question that haunts the memory of all the children of immigrants: “Why did they leave?” She provides a response that suggests the scope of the mystery: “We never knew. It was a taboo subject; they never spoke about it.” The whole of the film then turns around that mystery.

  In the immense literature of exile, certain authors do, however, touch on the answer. J. M. G. Le Clézio, for example, by means of a simple story, sheds light on the issue. In his book L’Africain he tells the story of his father, a doctor who leaves one morning for the ends of the world so that he would no longer have to put up with an overbearing hospital manager who ordered him, at their very first meeting, in a ritual close to an initiation ceremony, to send him his cartes de visite, his calling cards . . . wait, could he have gone so far away just because of some small photographs, a few pieces of paper? Yes, he could have, to refuse the type of relation with the world that this practice supposes. He would leave then for French Guiana, then Africa, because a map of the world is always bigger than a carte de visite. You think you have read everything on exile until you read a simple story like that, which touches and surprises you: every story is unique, but a simple resemblance is like a shared treasure. The following phrase, for example, which is very fine and which says everything about leaving: “He had chosen something else.”

  A man who leaves incites always a sort of anxious quivering, between desire and fear, and generally provokes the most unanimous reprobation. As soon as he leaves, the round of gossip and recrimination begins. Bad-mouthing colleagues, well-wishing friends, everyone has their say. But what is he doing, leaving like that? He can’t stand still. A man who leaves breaks, for himself, the thread of time, the order of years and worlds, he shows that fixed times and places can be mixed up and broken, that the music of time is multiple and that he is free to live as he wants.

  All of a sudden he is alone: the only one who knows it, who feels that he has to leave, to escape, and find the vanishing point of humanity’s adventure.

  Maxime was a man who left, departed. By all accounts he was a skillful talker, ready to rid himself of his bonds and ties, like the illusionist Houdini, a great star of the time, famous for his own spectacular escapes and whose picture Maxime had pinned to the wall of his dressing room. You catch a glimpse of him, he arrives, says a few words. Then he slips away, a bit like a fencer, whose sharp determination and elegance of movements he shares. Sometimes he has a rant; other times he throws a punch. But he never gets into a sterile argument, an endless discussion or—especially not—a lovers
’ tiff. He never lets the insult outwit the sidestep, the recrimination get the better of the leap. Besides, he has an inimitable way of leaving high and dry those who bore him and whom he leaves hanging literally in midsentence: he gets up, a little handshake or a quick nod of the head—hail the artist.

  *

  The boat is now at the quayside. You have to imagine this man, in the middle of the flowers and wild animals, stepping onto shores that he knows virtually nothing about. He has no papers; he seems to need nothing or no one. Straightaway the police, inevitably, take an interest in him.

  On that day, around noon, as attested in the customs and immigration registers, there was a “serious incident” between “Maxime Ferrier, a passenger with no papers,” and the police force. It was an old, nearly retired police officer called Coquillard who was in charge. He was famous for his name, which in French means “bandit” or “marauder.” He makes it difficult for the young man to enter the country. There is a shortage of labor for sure, but you can’t let in just anyone. You have to “ensure an increase in movements in and out but also maintain control of the country,” as it says in the training booklet for overseas customs and immigration officers.

  This marks the beginning of an almost uninterrupted altercation between Maxime and the forces of law and order, which would endure over time and different regimes and leave him with the reputation of being an uncontrollable hothead. On this occasion it is “thanks to the intervention of Madame Bartolini” that the problem would be resolved, but the police report, drafted in the dull, nonspecific language typical of this kind of prose, gives no more details. You can, however, easily imagine the scene. Madame Bartolini steps forward. Elegant, refined, voluble like an Italian woman who has crossed all the oceans of the world, she freely mixes business and theater. This year she has chartered the whole ship for her flowers and beasts. She vouches for Maxime and convinces the immigration officer he is an exceptional acrobat; resistance is futile.