Some time before we were married he had started the Humanity movement along with four other young men—Vira, Cyril, Raoul, and Pascal. Humanity campaigned against capital punishment. The boys held their monthly meetings at our place on Saturday evenings. After our marriage we were renting a very simple house on the mountainside in the heights of Port Louis. As far as I was concerned, in the early days, they could just as well have been a group of football fans. I think I never took them seriously. But how could I have done otherwise? I knew nothing about politics and the death penalty, even though death sentences had been regularly handed down, but none had been carried out for several years.
But after three years the authorities had decided to execute a prisoner. He was Gilles Bazerte, age thirty. He’d already been in prison for ten years. One night he had used a sword to kill his wife and her parents as they slept. He was twenty then and he’d just got married. His wife was expecting their first child. She was nineteen.
By now Ben and I were no longer living in the house with gray plaster walls in the heights of Port Louis. We’d begun to leave behind the simple and sometimes happy-go-lucky life of a young couple, taking each day as it comes. We had what I liked to think was a joint project, but I was the one who wanted to do the same as everyone else, take out a mortgage, buy a plot of land, have a house built. Ben was very hesitant about moving, about leaving Port Louis. He loved it there so much. One day I managed to persuade him to visit a plot of land that was for sale in a village on the coast in the north of the country and Ben changed his mind. Was it the purity of the elements on the Saturday when we visited this plot for the first time? A blue sky, a sun as yellow as a lemon. The tall plants covered the plot with colors of gold. Was it that dirt and sand road winding through the eucalyptus trees, the Indian almond trees, the cactus and the thorny scrub that led to a little hollow surrounded by gleaming dark rocks? Was it the unbelievably soft feel of the seawater against your ankles? Was it the calm of life in that place, the birds in the trees, the wind in the leaves, the creaking chain of a passing bicycle, the motor horn from a cake salesman’s van, the barking of a dog?
We were living in our new house there when the papers ran stories about the imminent execution of Gilles Bazerte. The Humanity movement sprang into action. Ben took on the role of leader, soldier, politician. Press conferences, sit-ins, demonstrations, meetings with ministers, vigils outside the prison. For three months he could talk of nothing else. But I was pregnant and more remote than ever from all this business. While Ben was fighting for a man’s life I was preparing a nest.
He organized a big march from the capital to the Beau Bassin prison, where Bazerte was incarcerated. A silent, white-clad march that ended in a fight and two days’ imprisonment for Ben. But Gilles Bazerte was hanged all the same, early in the morning, one Thursday at the start of winter. When the telephone rang and I heard Ben weeping I was sad that he had lost his battle but relieved that all that business was over at last. My feelings for him that gray morning were simple and sincere. My actions too: a cup of tea, a chair beside his own, a hand stroking his back. I had nothing helpful to say to him, nothing to give him courage, to lift him up again. I had no knowledge, no wisdom to help him come to terms with it all. I wonder whether he missed that.
I gave birth shortly before the end of the winter. Over there in that village in the north this was a time of cold mists in the mornings, days of hazy, faded yellow light, dark, chilly nights that suddenly swooped down. When I came home from the hospital with our little boy in my arms I noticed blue butterflies and robins in the garden. It was barely 9:00 in the morning and the summer was on its way. I remember thinking, what shall I do now?
Oh, I should have danced around with my little Vicky in my arms. I should have laughed and sung. I should have given thanks to all the gods and all the saints and filled my house with soft and joyful music.
But, of course, it doesn’t occur to you to do anything like this. And so this very special day when you come back home and both of you have become parents, just when you should be starting to form the bonds for this new family, this day fades into darkness and is forgotten.
CHAPTER 4
There was a time when I had albums filled with photographs showing us at different stages of our life.
Coming out of the church on the stone steps, his arm around my shoulder, a gesture that made my veil bunch up around my head, his jacket unbuttoned. Our smiles.
In the house on the mountainside in the heights of Port Louis. I’m sitting in a plastic chair beneath the mango tree. Behind me there is a cactus with orange flowers. I never knew its name.
My mother and me in our kitchen, one Sunday. There are slices of fish on a dish, and three purple eggplants waiting to be cut up.
Me at
