Riders Together

Riders Together

Guide par ton odeur vers charmants climate

Je vois an port rempli de voiles et de mâts

Encor tout fatigues par la vague marine

Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers

Qui circule dans l’air et m’enfle la narine

Se mele dans mon âme aux chants des mariners.*

From “Parfum Exotique,” a description of Mauritius by Baudelaire

Ah! Mon Village

Comme tu es beau

Quand le ciel est sans nuage

Et avec tous ces chants melodieux des corbeaux

From “Mon Village,” by George Stephen Fanfan,

A fisherman of Grand Gaube

Always when the day begins, Octave rises from his bed and goes to the open door of his family’s fishing hut to search the sky. This morning the air was cool and fresh, swept by a slight southeasterly trade wind. The sky was just beginning to gray over the stars and a pale, late quarter-moon looked insubstantial and thin. The village was already awake even though only the sky showed the approach of dawn. Octave could hear the voices of fishermen and the splash of cars from the cove. Some of the pirogues were moving into the lagoon. He quickly palled on a pair of ragged shorts and harried to a neighboring hut. Octave’s gruff bark of “George” was answered by a muffled groan from within and he returned home where his mother was preparing his morning tea.

*Guided by your odor to the charming climate

I see a port fall of sails and masts

Still exhausted by the waves of the sea

Daring the perfume of the green tamarind trees

Which circles in the air and fills the nostrils

And mingles in my spirit with the songs of the sailors

(A rough literal translation. RC)

As Octave sat on a rock in his yard sipping the hot sweet tea and listening to the wind voices in the wind-bent filao trees, as was his habit in the early morning, an old man, his uncle Robert, came up the path. Robert fished at night with bamboo cages and now he was going home.

“Mofine, mofine,” mofine: bad luck ) the old man complained. He said he had only three pounds of fish to show for the night’s work. “Ena trop boucoup pechere, zotla rode posson partout – et poisson misere. C’est malheureux, mofine, mofine. Too many fishermen now, they hunt fish everywhere in the lagoon – the catch is miserable, It makes for unhappiness, bad luck, bad luck.

Octave’s voice was almost harsh. “Don’t say mofine,” he said, “Don’t speak like that, my uncle. It is the will of God.”

The old fishing village of Grand Gaube, founded by freed slaves of mixed African and French blood a century before, lay quiet and serene in its small cove on the northernmost extreme of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Spreading inward from the shore toward the sugar cane fields were five little communities, Grand Gaube proper, Callasse, Roche Terre, Melville and Batie. Two paved roads, one following the seashore to Cap Malheureux: where the whites had their weekend beach homes and the other reaching island to the main highway to Fort Louie, the Mauritian capital and only harbor, met at right angles in the center of the village, so there was no through traffic. Here were the police station, post office, dispensary, “family planning” clinic, Roman Catholic church and primary school, a few small Chinese grocery stores and wine shops and a gracious park along the cove with its grove of filao trees where, in the afternoons, the fishermen sat mending their nets, building and repairing their wooden pirogues, weighing their catches, haggling with the Indian fish mongers and, for much of the time, just sitting, gossiping or playing rummy and gambling.

Extending in a semi-circle around the cove and up and down the two main roads and numerous little cobbled lanes were small one-story rock, concrete or wooden houses with small yards, a few trees or semi-tropical plans and sometimes a garden set behind low stone walls.

In the inland quarter of Roche Terre, at the junction of the main village street and the road to Port Louis, stood the house of Dhanilall Thug, or Prem as his friends called him. Prem was a Hindu student who had been unemployed for the past two years since he lacked money to continue his studies and could not find a job, even working as a laborer in the sugar cane fields like his father. Prem’s house, partly hidden by the over-hanging branches of native leela and mango trees, was tin-roofed and sided with cheap lumber and except for beds and a crude table, almost bare inside. It was typical of the dwellings of the island’s mostly Indian sugar cane workers; what extra money there was usually went for education. The Creole fishermen near the shore, in contrast, had much better houses. Usually a wide front porch, immaculate red-tiled floors, curtains and table-cloths, many framed pictures of their relatives, a large pink doll or two for decoration, and always a fresh batch of ferns or flowers on the table. Both the Creoles and Indians liked to paper their inside walls with magazine illustrations.

Prem’s father, who sold peanuts in Grand Gaube in the evening, and a brother who was earning money to pay for his apprenticeship as a tailor, had already left the house when Prem awoke. Two teenage brothers and a small sister were still sleeping. Two older sisters had married well and lived in Port Louis. Prem had stayed out of school for three years to work in the cane fields and help his father pay for their dowries. As the only educated member of his family, Prem had a small room of his own with a desk where he kept his old schoolbooks, letters, a stamp collection and seashells. On a peg hung his Boy Scout uniform; he was the chief commissioner for the northern half of the island. There were also his junior lifesaving certificates; he still went to practice every Sunday. Prem was proud of his books; he had a fall collection of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s poems. But he had not been in school for two years now and the rats had nibbled at the edges of some of the books.

This morning, like Octave, Prem rose and looked at the sky. Seeing the sky was cloudless except for a low black mass on the northern horizon, he too hurriedly scrambled into a pair of torn pants and a faded shirt. He went outside to the tap and splashed some cold water on his face, wiping it with a rag, and then carefully brushed his teeth. Unlike his father and mother and the younger children, Prem and his oldest brother used a brush and toothpaste. Then, with a goodbye to his mother, who was heating cakes to sell to the schoolchildren later in the morning, Prem took his breathing tube, mask and rubber fins and hurriedly started down the road to the cove.

For some weeks now, Prem had been going fishing every morning with Octave. Although long passing acquaintances, they had become friends two months before during the evenings when Prem, worrying about his future, had gone to sit and watch the sunset under the filao trees along the cove, Prem had been despairing and wanted to be alone to think. He did not know what to do, and after searching for every kind of job, had begun to think Shakespeare was right, life was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Then one evening Octave told him two South African tourists had hired his pirogue for a week’s skin-diving. He wanted to know if Prem would come along as an interpreter since the South Africans did not understand Creole, the island’s French patois, and Octave knew little English, The week had been a fine adventure; one of the South, Africans had killed a shark and Prem had helped pull it into the pirogue. Then they had left, giving Prem a set of fins and a mask and he had continued to fish with Octave every day. If the catch was not good, Octave gave him one or two fish to take back to his family but sometimes, when they caught as much as twenty or thirty pounds of fish and octopus, Prem would get two or three rupees.*

The future of Prem’s family was precarious. His father was 56 and would be forcibly retired from the sugar plantation in four more years, meaning that the family’s earnings of 31 rupees a week would fall to a pension of a mere 20 rupees a month. Prem, at 22, had spent the past two years writing to seventy-six hospitals in England applying for a job either as an orderly or to enroll in nurse’s training, as many Mauritian youths had done in the past. If he could only get to England, Prem thought, he could save enough to send money home to finance the education of his two youngest brothers whom his father had taken out of school. Bat as time wore on his applications grew increasingly more desperate and the answers more curt. In a way it was a race against time. There was not only his father’s age to consider but there were now already 15,000 high school graduates without jobs and the number mounted by another 7,000 or so each year. Most of them were also trying to get to England.

Security and a happily ever after, in Prem’s mind, had come to take the form of acceptance by such imagined havens as St. Matthew’s Hospital in London, the Royal West Sussez Hospital of Chichester, Southend-on-Sea Hospital or Pontefract General Infirmary. But month by mouth, the negative replies came in. “I have my full quota of overseas students for some time ahead…I am sorry, so many Mauritian students have applied…I regret…I regret…unable to help you…your application has been unsuccessful…cannot consider…no vacancy…no vacancy….”

Finally, a letter came. Appearing, as it seemed to Prem, like a guardian angel, a Miss R. K. Ware, Principal Nursing Officer, Churchill Hospital, Oxford, England, wrote that he could be admitted for training as soon as the hospital secured a worker’s permit for him. But she warned this might take as much as three years. More months passed and then one day the Mauritian government announced it had tightened up its qualifications. Two passes on one’s high school certificate, as Prem had, were no longer enough; three were required. Dismayed, Prem went to the Labor Ministry. The officials told him that in his case the new requirements could be waived if the hospital matron in England agreed. A letter to her would be sent accordingly. The letter went to London bat for some reason was not forwarded by the Mauritian High Commission there. Prem wrote Miss Ware desperately, trying to explain what happened. Her reply was like a great steel door slamming on his hopes of emigration. “I am deeply sorry, Mr. Thug,” she wrote, “but as you have been turned down by your Government, I am unable to help you in any way.”

Unable to help you in any way. What would become of them, Prem wondered, himself, his family, the Mauritians? Fall of sound and fury, he kept repeating to himself those evenings by the cove, signifying nothing.

The quick flatter of morning birds brought Prem out of his reverie. The sugar cane scurried with waking life as he walked. The quiet thudding of his sandals in the dust, the squeak of mice and chirping of feeding birds, sounded against the other secret noises of the dawn. Sometimes an angry defiance rose up in Prem as if the frustration would well over, It reminded him of those words of Lucifer’s in Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place

And can make a Heaven of Hell

A Hell of Heaven

Better to reign in Hell

Than serve in Heaven

Although a Hindu by birth – his mother prayed each morning to a little shrine of the monkey god, Hanuman, in their garden – Prem believed in the Biblical account of creation and Adam and Eve. He also half-believed there would be a Day of Judgment. One of his friends in the village, Andre, a Creole fisherman, maintained that the plight of Mauritius fulfilled the prophecies of Revelation.

“The Apocalypse is drawing near,” Andre told Prem one day. “Day after day, we see the people becoming more evil. There is a place in the book of Daniel where he says that in the last days and the last times before the ending of the world, God will fill all the people with intelligence. Before and after Daniel’s time until now this was not true, but we see it in this generation, in this time we live in. We are living at the point, Prem.” Prem thought Andre, who was as pale as a Frenchman, a little mad and yet he too felt a sense of apocalypse. In the village, the old men also spoke of it and said starvation was coming. Even three years ago a fisherman might take home a catch worth five rupees on an average day; now he was lucky to get two or three. And what would happen a year, two years, five years from now?

Only a week before a Hindu classmate of Prem’s at school had committed suicide. His parents, illiterate cane workers like Prem’s, could not understand why their son could not find a job after they had sacrificed for years for his education. They criticized him for laziness. One evening he went behind his house and hung himself.

Other youths were turning to a new revolutionary force called the Mouvement Militant Mauricien. Prem had attended an MMM rally in a neighboring village. Berenger, its leader, a white, had attacked the government for allowing famine, disease, prostitution, humiliation and exploitation among the people and called for a violent revolution to sweep all the capitalists aside. Prem had silently agreed with much of what Berenger said but he did not understand how the MMM would succeed any more than the present government in providing jobs for the people. Instead, he felt, violence might ruin the island’s economy and send it back to subsistence poverty and possibly starvation. Prem felt there had to be another way.

But the speech that disturbed him most was one by a young Hindu schoolteacher, Dev Virahsawmy, who said that “the present educational system, with its heavy emphasis on parrot learning produces masses of expensive illiterates who have been psychologically and mentally raped….There are those who argue that the present system prepares Mauritians for emigration. But anyone who has given the emigration question some attention will understand how facile and unrealistic, not to say tragic, such a stand is. Our educational system should prepare Mauritians to live decently in Mauritius.”

It is true, Prem thought. I was a fool to think everything could be solved if I could only get to England. He remembered something else the speaker had said, “Latin and Greek, Shakespeare and Milton are still taught in many schools while the knowledge of modern technology and agriculture and Mauritian history is practically non-existent; Mauritian students burn the midnight oil to learn by heart the Battle of Hastings.”

“September 29, 1066, at Semlac.” Prem automatically recalled, “The Norman victory led William the Conquerer to claim the English throne.” So much of what you learned by rote stuck in your mind. But he agreed that there should be more emphasis on technology and agriculture. But at the expense of the rest? For Prem loved English literature and found the poems and dramas a great solace in life, even though he sometimes misquoted his favorite passages. Perhaps his favorite was “Julius Caesar” and he often quoted to himself, “Why does he bestride the narrow world like a colossus? We petty men under his huge legs peek about to find ourselves dishonorable graves….”

What the MMM says is true, Prem said to himself. But what can they do? How are they going to solve the problem of unemployment when we have too many people in Mauritius. The speaker didn’t want people to emigrate. But has he enough jobs to give all the people?

At the end of the meeting, Prem had run into another youth from Grand Gaube, George, a Creole student and poet. George told him he had joined the MMM and said its real plan was to stage a revolt but not for five or six years or until the police and unions could be penetrated and organized. Prem noticed all the speakers and MMM officers had come in big new cars.

In the village too, one heard talk of revolt. Not from the fishermen or cane workers but in the gangs of government relief laborers who were building a road. All over the island the government supported 15,000 such laborers, paying them four rupees a day for three days’ work a week. The Hindu foreman of the gang in Grand Gaube often cursed the government leaders as “vampires” and “Ali Baba and his forty thieves.” He often spoke of the coming revolt, when the people would “walk on blood.” One day he told Prem, “Our blood has not yet become hot, but when it does the revolution will be bloody. Oar children have no bread, but the ministers and their deputies are eating gold and diamonds.” Prem wondered if the foreman was a secret MMM agitator

Prem harried his pace as he neared the cove. He could see George, a young Creole who had only been fishing for a year and served as Octave’s boatman, was already pushing the pirogue toward the shore where Octave and Karl were waiting with their diving gear, the mast, sail, harpoon guns, spears and a gaff. To Prem, as he harried along the beach, it seemed as it did every morning, as if he were entering another world. He found the Creole fishermen, inclined to be quiet, almost sullen on land, to be a happy, carefree lot once they were under sail. “Octave welcomes life as it comes,” Prem said to himself. Octave, a mason by profession, had turned to the sea only two years ago when most construction slowed down with the fall in the island’s economy. Now, unable to earn more than a rupee or two a day fishing with the nets, lines or cages the other fishermen used, Octave had struck out for himself in the more hazardous underwater fishing, using spears for octopus and a harpoon gun for large fish just inside or beyond the reef. Since there were sharks and barracuda in the waters, both inside the lagoon and beyond, few villagers would dive underwater. Indeed, there were some who could not swim. Almost every year, especially in the stormy seas of winter, a few villagers were drowned.

When Prem reached Octave and Karl they greeted each other with a nod and waded in silence oat to the pirogue. They loaded the mast, rigging, gaffs, spears and stowed the diving gear in the stern.

The pirogue was constructed of local bois noire wooden beams and planks imported from Singapore. Heavy rocks had been put in the bottom as ballast and a large rock tied to a rope served as an anchor. Octave climbed in and moved to the stem with a gaff to help George push the pirogue past the rocks and across the shallow water now that the tide was out. Karl and Prem waded alongside. Karl, a wiry but muscular man, was considered one of the toughest Creoles in the village. Me frequently got into fights when he drank too much ran and once had been jailed for two months for knifing another fisherman. But he was also one of the ablest divers in Grand Gaube and used to double his earnings from the sea by gambling in the afternoons and evenings. The fishermen all said Karl knew all the tricks of gambling but no one had ever caught him cheating. Yet he usually won.

After some minutes Prem and Karl climbed into the boat and Karl tied a single narrow-bladed oar to a wooden rowlock and began rowing at a steady even pace toward the reef. Octave shouted directions to George, pointing out into the lagoon. “We’ll be at Ile d’Amber by sunrise,” he said, lifting the heavy mast into its fitting. He put a worn stick into the rudder’s slot as a tiller and raised the sail.

The sail flapped loosely for a few seconds until it caught the breeze. George lay down the gaff, Karl stopped rowing and the pirogue skimmed through the water, the waves slapping gently at the bow. The eastern sky grew fairer and it was possible to see the outline of the church steeple and the thatched and tin-roofed hats along the shore. A flock of pigeons started from the rocks and flew around the cove and settled again, white pigeons with iridescent wings.

Near some rocks as they moved into the lagoon two Hindu youths were wading, hunting for crayfish. One had caught a small octopus and was beating it against a rock.

“Look, I’ll scare them,” said Octave. He shouted, “Hey, over there. What’s that couyonade? (couyonade: nonsense) Will you let that small octopus go? You will have trouble. Will you leave it alone?”

One of the Hindu youths, apparently afraid since it was illegal to kill baby octopus near the shore, turned on the other. “You are silly.” they could hear him whisper across the water. “You are hitting a tiny one. Let it alone. I’ll wait for you by the church.” The youth scrambled for the shore, the other one not far behind as Karl and Octave roared with laughter.

“Many Malabar fishermen, we make them go away,” said Karl.
(Malabar: a derogatory Creole word for a Mauritian of Indian decent)

That is not good,” Prem told him. “They were frightened.”

Karl cursed, “‘Shut up your liki. * You have not the right to be angry. You are not a Malabar coolie, You are a Creole.”
(liki: the female sexual organ; a common Creole swear word)

“Look at the light coming,” said George, “like silver.” A little color came into the eastern sky and almost at once the lonely dawn line crept toward the sea turning it from leaden grey to a misty dark green. Green appeared in the tree line on the shore and the earth, was gray brown. In the pirogue, the faces lost their grayish shine. Octave’s face, half-hidden under a shapeless slouch hat with a torn brim, seemed to darken with the growing light.

“This is a good time of the day,” Octave murmured, feeling wide-awake now that they were underway. “Will I get some fish with you, George? Will we catch fifty pounds today?”

“Non,” coughed George in a sleepy voice.

“I mast have twenty rupees for the New Year.” Octave said. “Now I have not one cent to buy my sweetheart a present.” Octave was engaged to be married to a girl in the nearby village of Poudre d’Or, but, as the others were aware, lacked enough money to pay for a wedding. A church wedding was expensive since Creole custom demanded the groom hire a hall and dance band in Port Louis for receptions that sometimes lasted until dawn and then there was the cost of furniture to consider. Octave planned to live in his father’s house in Grand Gaube, perhaps adding a room or two, which he would build himself.

“Not even one cent for the New Year, I have not,” grumbled Karl.

“We mast fish hard to have twenty rupees.” said Octave.

“Fishing? You, can make so much fishing? Non.” Karl grinned at Octave’s joke. Lately they had been bringing home catches of twenty to thirty pounds. This meant about twelve rupees in all with two going to the boat’s owner and the rest being split among the four of them. Karl grinned at Prem. “Hey, you are no Malabar. No coolie. You look like a Creole. You eat chicken, beef and pork. You can ask for the hand of Octave’s sister.”

Prem was embarrassed. Hindus did not joke about their sisters and he was fond of Lydia, Octave’s younger sister who was pretty and fair. “I don’t eat pork,” he told Karl.

Octave agreed. “No, he doesn’t eat pork, But if you ask for the hand of my sister, Prem, you must eat pork and rats. And if you come to court on Sunday you can stay all night, if it rains. And on Monday you and I shall go fishing together. You can sleep with my…..” Octave began to laugh at Prem’s embarrassment.

Indeed, compared with the Creole fisherman, Prem was almost a Victorian romantic. He considered it daring of the sophisticated Hindu girls from Port Louis who came to his Sunday life saving classes and made jokes of his shyness. He never told his parents about them for fear they would object. In the village, some of the Hindu marriages were still arranged by the parents and the bride and groom only met on their wedding day. Prem had never danced until Octave and Karl took him to a Creole ball. His ideas on love, as on many things, came from books. His favorite was Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, the tragic love story of a dark-skinned Creole and a French girl. Virginie is forced to leave Mauritius for France after an idyllic childhood romance with Paul. She returns, unable to stay away, only to be shipwrecked near Cap Malheureux and washed ashore, drowned, at Paul’s feet. Prem never tired of reading over Virginie’s final farewell to Paul as she is about to leave for France. “Maintenant je reste, je pars, je vis, je meurs; fais de moi ce que tu veux. Fille sans vertu! J’ai pu resister &agave; tes caresses, et je ne puis soutenir ta doleur!”

Karl broke Prem’s train of thought. “You know the girls here don’t like fishermen. You must tell them you only go fishing for fun.”

Octave started to sing, in mock-romantic style, “La coeur guerira la blessure, parlez moi d’amour….”
**Warming up, he switched to “Oh, Capri, c’est fini” improvising lyrics as he went along.

Dance with me

Don’t hold me so tight

We will fall down

And the others will laugh

She is called Gabriel

She is beautiful

She doesn’t give her love

I am a hippie at heart

I understand joking

I’m sentimental

I take life seriously

“There is a woman in Beau Bassin,” began Karl, “who is called Belinda. She has a beautiful liki. I met her at the ball last Saturday in Tamarin. I got into a fight. There’s some bad ones there in Tamarin. All because I boasted of Grand Gaube.” **”The heart will cure the wound, speak to me of love.”

* (Freely translated: “Now I stay, I go, I leave, I die; do with me what you will. A girl without virtue. I can resist your caresses but not your suffering!”)

Octave asked. “Is she a little woman, the one you flirted with?”

Karl went on, “I made her younger sister too. At the dance. But I had no taste to sleep with them, these city girls from Beau Bassin. The older one got mad. I guess I was a little drunk.”

Octave said, “If I had been with you, we could have passed along that same road together.”‘

Karl: “Her little sister sat on my lap and I squeezed her breasts. I told her I most sleep with you. I asked her, what do you want? A necklace? A Coca Cola? But I must have you.

Octave: “If she was hot enough, who could have stopped her?” He shouted back to George, who was now holding the rudder, “Hey, gogot,*put the rudder to the outside.” He looked around at the water. “Little Arnaud said he saw a barracuda around here.”
(gogot: the male sexual organ. The Creole fisherman’s conversation at sea, although not at home or in mixed company, is filled with pungent expressions. Since they do not lend themselves to translation, I am left such words in the patois in the text.)

Octave began to sing again:

Non rien de rien

Je ne regrette rien

Non rien de rien

Je ne regrette rien

Dont to avait baleye les amoureux

Octave is singing a parody of Edith Piaf’s most memorable ballad

Karl said, “When you go to Tamarin, you must have a firm friend with you. Those people are tough and proud.”

“Like me.” said Octave.

“Four times truth, forty times lies,” Karl said, quoting a village saying. “She was much older than me,” he admitted.

“Not much.” laughed Octave. “Only forty-five. Two elderly sisters and Karl.” He began to laugh again and said, “Perhaps the two of them were whores.” He sang:

Little woman

The gallants promise you

Then run away

But don’t hug me too tight

I am fragile

You’ll make me afraid

“Buffoon.” snarled Karl. “Liki of your mama.” After a minute he added, “The woman of Beau Bassin wrote me a letter.”

“Will you go to Tamarin again?” asked Octave.

Karl shrugged. “To hell with her. There is not one taste to them, the women of Beau Bassin.”

Octave sang another chorus of “Je ne regrette rien.” A redness grew up out of the eastern horizon, catching with pink and silver light the small patches of broken white in the choppy water. Smoke rose from the chimney of an island sugar factory and Octave could now see the green slopes rising to the high plateau, all planted in sugar cane and beyond, blue hazy hills all still and far, far distant the strange volcanic peaks: the Moka Range, Corps de Garde and, pointing like a rocky finger to the sky, Pieter Both, named after the Dutchman who reached the top and then fell to his death two centuries before.

Octave took off his shapeless hat and mopped his face with it. His shorts and tricot were in rags, eaten away by the salt, sun, wind and rain. The sleeves of the worn tricot were tight on his arms, held down by bulging powerful muscles. Stomach and hips were lean and his legs, short, heavy and strong. His face was weathered a deep brown and his eyes, as they searched the water, were very bright blue and piercing, and wrinkled in the corners from squinting in the son. Thick black early hair framed a face that was both Gallic and African and neither: savage, humorous, wise, gentle, the face of the Mauritian Creole. There were strong deep lines cut from his cheeks in curves beside the mouth and it was when he laughed, as he did often showing his fine white teeth, that he looked as young as he was. His hands were hard, with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells. The space between thumb and forefinger and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus. His feet bore small cats from the coral, as did Karl’s and Prem’s and because they spent hours each day in the salt water, they festered and took a long time to heal.

Prem asked Karl what he put on the cuts.

“The only good thing is to masturbate and rub the sperm in. Rub it well. It’s a good medicine.”

Prem, as frequently happened, could not tell if the fishermen were serious or not. Octave was singing again, this time to the melody of “Island in the Sun.”

Oh mon Ile au soleil

Paradie entre terre ciel

Ou le flot le long du jour

Change au sable fin chanson d’amour*

*Oh, island in the sun

Paradise between earth and sky

Where the boats in the daytime

Sing by the soft sand songs of love

“George was masturbating this morning.” Karl announced with a grin. “I saw him waiting on the road and the headlights of a car came behind him and the light caught his hand. I saw something shining and I said, ‘George, do you wear such a big ring?’ ‘Non.’ says George, ‘I don’t wear a ring.’ ‘Then why is your finger glittering?” George wiped his hand on his shirt but I saw it in the headlights of that car.” Karl laughed. “The hell with you, George. The hell with you. You were masturbating.”

George protested, “Non, non, I was not.”

Prem felt angry. “Don’t speak like that, Karl.”

Octave stopped singing. “Shut up your liki, Karl. George, spit.” George tried to spit but his mouth was dry. “George, don’t lie. You masturbated.” As Octave and Karl roared with laughter, George, to Prem’s surprise, mumbled, “Well, only men do it,” making the two fishermen laugh more.

Octave was in high spirits now. At the top of his lungs he sang from the bow to the tune of “Never On A Sunday.”

On voit des gris sous le ciel bleu

Un bateau deux bateaux trois bateaux

S’ent vont chantant

Dans le real on coup de siecle

Un oiseau, deux oiseaux, trois oiseaux

Font du beau temp*

“Oh. Bon Dieu, oh, mo mama, will I get fish with you today, George,” Octave grinned. “Will I have to tell you everything, always.”

They were approaching the reef and now there were outcroppings of “n…..”heads and meadows of sea grass and the watery roar of the sea beating against the reef masses of broken coral and sand. They had passed over the deeper channel of the lagoon and now entered the shallower waters of a shoal. As they drew near the reef and as the blinding san came over the horizon and fell on the pirogue, they sailed alongside a little fleet of five pirogues moving into the tossing waves, and splashing their gaffs on the water, hissing and beating batagesticks against the hulls to frighten fish into their large net, which flashed with beaded light in the spray. And the sun fell on their sail. The weathered canvas was gold and bright and they felt the sudden warmth of the sun. The white foam of the surf glittered with reflected light.

*We see some gray in the blue sky

One boat, two boats, three boats

Go singing

In the real the blow of the century

One bird two birds three birds

Make the weather good

(Octave, of coarse, improvised lyrics when he did not know the words, in a mixture of French and the Creole patois)

“Alle degage!” they heard the patron of the net fishermen shout. The two net boats moved together and the three gaff men in the batage boats shoved the craft faster and faster over the rocks. A roar of shouts and curses went up as the five boats bumped together and the heavy dripping net was hauled in.

“Pull hard!”

“Swing around!”

“Turn, turn!”

“Draw it in. Faster, faster.”

“Let the plomb go. Take the oars. Hold it fast.”

“Change your wine, François. That Bordeaux is too strong for you.”

“Quickly, Pa, quickly. Pull it in.”

“No, not that way, Herve. I’ll kill you. You are good for nothing but whoring and stealing.”

“Liki to mama, go fix the net.”

“Pull your boat in line, Pa.”

“Rolland, you gogot, barricade them with the net.”

“Hurry, hurry, ah, mo mama, ah, Bon Dieu, mo mama.”

Before striking out on his own, Octave had worked for some months with the net fishermen and he had liked the excitement of maneuvering the boats to catch shoals of fish and tossing the nets in the heavy surf. But there had been too many days of having to share a catch of twenty pounds among fifteen or sixteen men. A man could starve on that.

Octave watched as the boats moved apart again and the fishermen unfurled their sails. In each boat a lone man was standing in the bow with his gaff, turning the pirogues into the wind. He was silhouetted back against the sunrise and each boat, as the gaff man lifted his long wooden staff and splashed the water, seemed to have wings of bright golden spray. Beyond them and outside the reef were three large double-sailed boats with ten-man crews. They were thirty-two feet long, almost twice the size of the ordinary fisherman’s eighteen-foot pirogue, and with motors could take the heavy waves and go to the three offshore islands, L’Ile Platte, L’Ile Ronde and the fortress-shaped Coin de Mire and even twenty miles outside the reef where the currents would carry a pirogue oat to sea. Such a larger boat, called a peniche, brought home a big haul of fish every day. The three were owned by prosperous proprietors in the village.

Grand Gaube was the largest fishing village in Mauritius. Its 600 fishermen accounted for one-sixth of all those registered on the island, although about twice as many more men fished part time to feed their families until they found work. The fishermen of Grand Gaube had long sought the government’s help in getting large enough boats to go outside the reef bat in the past two years they had not been successful. Two months before an American fisheries expert had been sent by the United Nations to Mauritius. But his assignment turned out to be conducting a 5,000,000 rupee investigation of deep sea fishing, which, if it benefited anyone, would help the big, largely white commercial operators in Fort Louis. But the village council had still invited him to Grand Gaube and one day the American arrived-and met for an hour with the fishermen in the Roman Catholic primary school. The schoolroom was packed; more than two hundred fishermen came. Prem acted as interpreter and he soon saw the American, not understanding Creole or the fishermen’s rough manner, was somewhat frightened. He too became ill at ease when several fishermen shouted that they had been bluffed too many times in the past and no longer trusted the government. When the American said any help would have to go through the government, some of the fishermen stomped out and did not return. But others were more reasonable. The American said the important thing was to get the fishermen offshore and out of the depleted lagoon. He said if they choose leaders among themselves and formed an association of at least a hundred men, he would see what he could do about helping them to get bigger boats.

At the end of the meeting, the American promised to come back in two weeks. When a month went by and he did not return, Prem, and Octave went along with three of the older fishermen, patrons of net cooperatives, to see the American at his office in the Agricultural Ministry some twenty miles away on the other side of the island. They hired an old taxi and the fishermen all wore suits and ties and slicked down their hair as if they were going to church.

The American seemed friendly, surprised to see them. He said he had taken up the matter of bigger boats with the government and had been informed a fishing association already existed in Grand Gaube, part of a Catholic-sponsored organization with branches in nineteen villages around the coast. The fishermen knew of it. It was headed by a carpenter, one of the three men in Grand Gaube who owned a large boat. He charged a rupee’s membership fee and twenty-five cents a month. Less than thirty fishermen had joined. The others objected to the fee. What was the money to be used for? Moreover, the Catholic priests who led the organization in Port Louis seemed chiefly concerned with getting the fishermen to inform on anyone who used illegal dynamite or mosquito nets in the lagoon at night.

Octave tried to explain. “It’s just to make fishermen catch fishermen. To create hostility among friends. We are only poor fishermen….” Prem translated and the American replied,, “All fishermen are poor the world over.”

The American went on, “If you do not like the existing organization, it is up to the fishermen to change its character. It is already legally registered and the government wants as to work through it. Now I have also contacted the American Embassy for help. I think I have a fairly firm promise of help. They have agreed to give the necessary materials. But the boats must be built in the villages by the fishermen themselves. We call this ‘self-help.’ The fishermen must contribute their labor.”

Prem translated his words, knowing what the answer would be. In the village the boat builders or marine carpenters were not fishermen. It was a completely separate thing. And how could the fishermen on one or two rupees a day pay the marine carpenters to build boats for them. Hadn’t the American been to a fishing village on the island to see how it worked? The fishermen explained the situation but the American was adamant. “It has to be self-help,” he said. “The fishermen must contribute something. Otherwise they will not take care of the bigger boats. We have a lot of experience in this. They must contribute something.

The fishermen said the boats they needed would cost 20,000 rupees each and ten would be enough for Grand Gaube. Multiply this by six, Prem thought, and with 1,200,000 rupees you could change the whole fishing economy. And yet the government and United Nations were spending four times that just for an investigation of commercial deep sea fishing that might not benefit the people for years. And they didn’t have years. Not in Grand Gaube. Fishing was, aside from working on the docks of Fort Louis, the main occupation of the Creoles.

Prem tried to pat this into words and was surprised to hear the edge of anger in his own voice. The American started to sound impatient.

“Tell them there are just too many fishermen. There are not enough fish in the lagoon. I know fishermen have many problems and I sympathize with them. But speaking frankly, there are too many fishermen and there aren’t enough fish in the lagoon. Also, I should remind you I am here on a project requested by the government. The government has not asked for help for the lagoon fishermen. There are too many. They have got to find something else to do.”

But what? Prem was reminded of Hindu schoolteacher at the MMM meeting, saying the educational system should be changed to prepare Mauritians to live decent lives in Mauritius, How then did he propose to get everyone jobs? He also thought of Miss Ware: I am deeply sorry, Mr. Thug, bat as you have been turned down by your government, I am unable to help you in any way.

“There are too many fishermen. There are not enough fish in the lagoon….” the American kept repeating. Should Prem keep on translating he wondered. The fishermen knew that before they came. That was why they had come. And then an American woman had come in the door, excused herself, gestured to her watch to her husband and gone outside. The American said he was sorry but he was already late for another engagement. He shook hands with the fishermen and Prem but said nothing about a third meeting.

There was little conversation in the taxi until they drove through the outskirts of Port Louis. Then Octave said, “You had a hot discussion, Prem.” After a pause, he went on, “We are exhausted. To be relieved, we must have a bit of rum.” All agreed and they stopped at a cheap open-air rum shop along the harbor, Prem took only a glass of beer but the fishermen, after a double peg of rum, became animated once more and ordered a third round. Walking back to the taxi, Octave pat his arm around Prem’s shoulder. “You are like a brother to me, Prem. I am very, very unhappy when I look to the future. I am saving every rupee now to get married but I do not know what will happen when winter comes. Sometimes it is so cold in the water I want to cry out.” Octave stumbled on the curb; the rum had made him groggy. He straightened up and told Prem, “I do not live for money. I live for dignity.”

Now there was no more talk of the American or of bigger boats and Prem wondered to himself what would happen to Grand Gaube. If the fishermen could have the right boats and training, he thought, they could have a good life. If they could only organize. If they do not, they will never have anything. But there is no real hope for them, they have been promised so many times before. And somehow they no longer seem to have the spirit to get together and fight for what they must have. In the next two, three, four years what will happen? There will be many fishermen, less fish and some may starve.

Their life is hard. If you’re at sea you can get drowned at any time. Some days you catch nothing. And if you get nothing, what shall you eat? It will always be hard for the fishermen. And they are extravagant. At a Creole ball in the village, Prem had seen a woman with no shoes pay three rupees for a ticket to go and dance all night. A Hindu would have bought a pair of sandals instead, he felt. Also, the fishermen got into fist fights and kicking matches after they had drunk much at the balls. Yet they went to church the next morning . Sometimes Prem felt he would never understand them.

“Hey, Cokol!” Karl shouted at a passing pirogue, bringing Prem back to the present. “Cokol is the premier buffoon of Grand Gaube,” Karl told him. “One day he told his wife he was ill. At that time his wife was pregnant and he took one of her pills. He was sick for a week. One time his wife bought a big milk can. He used it for a Sega (Sega: the Mauritian variant of the calypso ) drum and it cracked up the side. Once he spent ten rupees on ram and then started to weep about it, the liki of his mother.”

Octave laughed. “He is a real couyon,(couyon: a foolish man) that one. Once Cokol was cutting his nails with a hedge cutter. His nails were so hard the edge became blunt.”

“Once he was cutting his hair and he drew an unbreakable comb through it and it split three ways,” said Karl.

“Cokol stepped on a laff (laff: a poison fish) but when he took his foot away the laff was already dead. You or I would have gone to sleep in the hospital.” Octave shifted the sail into the wind and everyone ducked his head as it swung around and the pirogue changed direction, moving parallel with the reef. Octave was impatient to start fishing. He said, “The boat is as slow today as a morpion (Morpion: the tiny crab-like flea transmitted in sexual intercourse) at the funeral of a femme petain.” (Femme petain: a prostitute)

Shafts of sunlight pierced the shallow green water beside them and the light made prisms above the pink, green, yellow and lavender coral. The boat entered deeper water, the green and brown and white of the deep shoal. Below, sand stretched emptily in the mist between little islands of coral and there was not a living thing in sight. They were near l’Ile d’Ambre now, a deserted sandy mound of tall grasses and filao trees.

“Where are we going?” asked George.

“On your mother.” Octave replied. He turned the tiller to the side, pointing the pirogue directly into turbulent break in the reef leading to the open sea. Barracuda Pass, a turbulent break in the reef leading to the open sea.

The milky green water became rougher than in the enclosed lagoon and it turned blue-black where the ram-part fell, sliff-like, a hundred fathoms into the sea. The boat started to toss gently in the slow swells and choppy waves. Octave stood in the stern, watching the sea. Dark gray clouds were beginning to form on the northern horizon. But toward the island the billowing white cumulus looked friendly and only the thin feathers of cirrus clouds were overhead.

“Push, push, George, take the gaff. Karl, pull the rigging. We shall work through the pass toward the rampart.” Octave stripped down to his swimming trunks and settled against the boat’s wooden edge. He squinted judiciously at the water, dipping in his fins to make them wet and slippery. “Wake up, Prem. Hand me the spear gun. You kill me, George. Can you reach the bottom with the gaff here? If not, use the oar. Will you give me a heart attack, George? The roughness of the water is determined by the size of the waves. You are a pubic hair, George. You are like a gogot. Rest a moment. The current itself is moving the pirogue.”

George sat down on the wooden edge and watched Octave rethread the line of his harpoon gun. Prem. was robbing spit on the inside of his visor to prevent it from clouding up underwater. Octave and Karl had already donned their fins and masks and flopped backward into the water when he finished. Once the two fishermen were swimming away from the boat, George told Prem, “Octave takes me to be stupid. He believes that I don’t know how to hold the boat. But how would he manage if I had not come?” Prem knew this to be true. Octave was dependent on the skill of George, whom he had taught to use the gaff and sail. He also knew George loved Octave like a father and trusted Octave’s profound knowledge of the sea completely.

The George and Octave