If, between December and April, strong northerly trade winds meet gusting southerly trade winds, cyclones are likely to swing in banana-shaped paths across the length of the Indian Ocean. Oppressive heat and a deathly stillness are the first signs of one’s approach. Dogs wilt, roads melt at the edges. Cyclone Gervaise followed the classic pattern.
‘Help me,’ said Odette. She was carrying two buckets of water and stopped to get her breath back. She took a corner of her skirt and wiped her face with it. Leonard didn’t move. ‘HEY! LEONARD!’
He looked up, sulking. His hair had grown and hung in his eyes. On Diego Garcia, his mother had given him a regular haircut. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You can carry that one,’ and she left one of the buckets in the street.
He made a face but did as his sister said. He put the bucket in the shack and said, ‘Alright?’ to his mother.
She didn’t respond. The weather was upsetting. She didn’t like the closeness. She thought the air was trying to strangle her, the stillness grabbed sound and stifled it. Her cold had gone but a cough replaced it. She coughed.
Leonard hadn’t forgotten that she was his mother, but too many times some mood got in the way. He knew he should do more, but – he thought – he was still a boy. Odette was still a girl. He shook his head, thinking that a girl shouldn’t have to work so hard.
Two days later, Gervaise cruised off the ocean and wheeled across Mauritius. It tossed rocks that kept roofs down and threw galvanised walls, empty oil barrels, trees, goats and cars into ditches. Houses collapsed, boats sunk, rivers burst their banks, the rain poured in solid blocks a mile square and three miles high. Bus timetables were suspended and warnings issued by the meteorological office at regular intervals. Roche Bois was flattened. Odette and Leonard carried their mother outside and laid her in the street.
The Ilois had never seen anything like it. Diego Garcia had been outside the cyclone area, sandwiched between the equatorial current and the Indian counter current; the worst weather there had been rain storms. Sometimes the wind picked up for a few days, but died down quickly.
Maude bled from a cut to her forehead. A sheet of tin had hit her. She dabbed her fingers over the wound, tasted blood and said, ‘Salty,’ to Odette.
Other people carried dead people down the street. Children wailed, ambulances and police-cars sirened between hospitals and the shanties as firemen trained hoses on fires and workmen attached grapples to the sides of ruined shacks.
‘Salty,’ she said, and the scales fell from her eyes. She could see everything exactly. Uncleared cyclone rubble was piled in the streets she walked. Raphael’s spirit stopped haunting her. One day she was exploring his old stamping grounds, leaning on walls and sitting on boxes in side streets; the following morning, she woke up and said, ‘He’s dead,’ and meant it. ‘Gone,’ and she stood up straight.
Odette had forgotten how tall her mother was. She said, ‘He went years ago.’
‘Did he?’ Maude put a hand over her mouth. ‘What’s the matter, Odette?’
‘You look… look well. Your face is different.’
‘It is different,’ she said, ‘and I feel different. Yes!’ And she went outside.
The air was thick. She patted a dog, and when Odette prodded Leonard into following her, she said, ‘No. Not now. I’m going on my own. Don’t follow me today.’
Leonard shrugged and looked at his sister. ‘Bye then,’ he said and went to sit on a wall.
He didn’t watch his mother walk away; Odette did. She had more of her mother’s intuition than she knew. She lifted a hand to wave but it stuck in mid-air without moving; it clenched into a fist; Maude rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.
She didn’t mean to catch a bus but was standing by a stop when one came along, so she got on. The conductor asked her where she was going. She shrugged.
‘Rupees?’ he said.
‘Here,’ she said, and took three fifty cent pieces from her pocket.
‘One rupee to Pamplemousses. You want to go there?’
‘Pamplemousses?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look!’ The conductor was impatient. Other passengers hadn’t paid their fares, and the bus would stop again soon. An inspector was lurking. ‘Pamplemousses?’
Maude shrugged. ‘Okay,’ and she let him take the coins from her hand. She took the ticket but didn’t know what to do with it, so she screwed it up and dropped it on the floor.
The bus left Port Louis behind. Pepinere, Le Hochet. At Terre Rouge, the road forked. Three goats were sitting in the triangle of dust formed by the junction of roads, and chewed while traffic sped around them. One scratched and stood up, waited for a gap between two lorries, and walked across the road. It bit a hedge and sat down in someone’s garden. Children played in a school playground, priests left a mosque in solemn groups.
A policeman on a moped with a leather satchel tied to the front mudguard, overtook the bus, waved to the driver and accelerated away. Two old women stood in a doorway with baskets on their heads.
Half-built concrete houses, piles of rubble left in Gervaise’s wake, broken lorries parked on verges. Shops selling fruit, beer and cakes. Small men working at sewing machines in the open air.
Maude watched these things, and needed reminding when the bus reached Pamplemousses. The conductor helped her off. The driver shook his head. One of her breasts had fallen through a hole in her dress. She tucked it back in, and didn’t watch for traffic when she crossed the road.
Pamplemousses is famous for its Botanical Garden. This contains one of the finest collections of tropical plants and palms on earth, and enjoys a worldwide reputation. Maude stood in front of its gates and watched as tourists avoided the hawkers and boys. They yelled, ‘Hey!’
‘What?’ (said a tourist).
‘You want guide?’
‘No. We’ll find our own way round.’
‘No! You need guide. I am guide. I can show places you don’t know unless!’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless I’m your guide!’
‘Look! Can’t you read?’ Signs stated ‘There is no official guide to the gardens. Entrance is free.’
Maude couldn’t read. No hawkers bothered her. She walked through the gates, and along a broad avenue of massive palms.
Narrow paths led off the main avenue, through trees and beside lakes and ornamental ponds. Tunnels of greenery dripped coolness in every season; Maude sat on a stone bench beneath a portico of flame trees.
Her mind was very clear; she knew who she was and where she was, where she had come from and how her husband had died. She knew her son was called Leonard and her daughter Odette. She closed her eyes, listened to the sound of the wind playing in the trees, and smelt flowers. The gentle gurgle of a stream, the voices of passing guides…
‘These are the famous Victoria Regia lilies. They can support the weight of a small child! Further on we see the Fan Palm, or Talipot. This tree blooms only once, and then only after one hundred years. Then it dies!’
‘Here we have the celebrated Gourami fish. If you wish to pull some grass and toss it in the pond, you’ll be able to observe them eating the grass.’
‘This tree was planted by Princess Margaret of England.’
‘These deer are descended from the original Java deer introduced to Mauritius by the Dutch.’
‘These giant tortoises are over one hundred years old. Originally, they came from Aldabra, a group of islands situated north west of Malagasy.’
A gardener, walking home after a long day up an olive tree with a knife (his own property), passed the portico where Maude sat. He was a small man, tired and smelling the roasting lamb his wife would be cooking. She cooked outside, under a mango tree with all her children counted and waiting. She covered her hair with a shawl, adjusted it in line with her fringe and sang a song she’d been taught in school. She’d been a child in Port Louis but preferred Pamplemousses.
The gardener leant against a tree and took deep breaths. He wasn’t a talker. Botanists often asked him questions but he always feigned ignorance or deafness. He was paid to tend the gardens, knew they were famous and knew he was lucky to work in the shade; he nodded good night to another gardener and took a cigarette out of his pocket.
He turned around and struck a match on a trunk of a Talipot palm. He squinted, inhaled and tossed the match in the portico. He saw Maude and walked towards her.
‘Hey!’ he said.
Maude did not move.
‘Hey! We’re closing now. Time to go home.’ He went to her and shook her. She was stiff but her eyes were open. He jumped back when she fell off the bench. She had been dead for three hours.
She lay on the ground as if she was still sitting. Flies buzzed around her nose and drank the fluids that ran from her eyes. The gardener stared at her for a minute before going for help.
When she was carried away, he remarked that she was as light as a child, and when a policeman asked him to sign a form stating that he was the finder of the body, he smoothed his hair, felt proud and wished his family could see him.