What Became of the White Savage (17 page)

How many hours had he spent on the forecastle, talking and joking about just such a situation? How much time spent imagining a place far removed from the cold and wet, away from the cramped life on board ship with orders being shouted day and night. Alone on a far-away beach, lying idly beneath the trees, surrounded by naked women. They all knew it was just a fantasy. It had been all too easy then to while away the time waiting for their turn at the watch, regaling each other with obscene tales, boasting of improbable amorous exploits. The older men with their talk of ports of call in the tropics, fleshed out with lewd details, the younger men dreaming of women with burnished skin and long black hair. None of it would ever be real.

And yet here he was, naked and alone, surrounded by naked women. But this was a waking nightmare. The irony was not lost on him. He thought of his shipmate Kermarec, the biggest braggart of them all on board the
Saint-Paul
, and sighed: “Well, Kermarec, old mate, what wouldn’t I give to change places with you now.”

He was startled out of his gloomy reverie by a flurry of activity among the women. They were hurrying towards the sandy point at the northern end of Round Bay. Waiakh was calling to them, shouting gleefully. He’d found a turtle on the sand. The women joined him, and using sticks to lever it they turned the creature over on its back, and dragged it back to the camp on a bed of hastily woven branches.

Reaching the camp, where Narcisse, the old woman and the mothers and babies had remained, they built a fire. Using a pointed shell, they cut the turtle’s throat, and took turns to drink the blood as it flowed from the neck. They cut up the still warm carcass and placed the pieces of meat on flat rocks wedged against the fire. The strips of white meat began to sputter and brown, giving off a faint smell. Cautiously, Narcisse took a strip, cooked it for a moment on the other side, a finishing touch not copied by the others, and stuck it in his mouth. He bit happily into the meat, thinking it tasted a bit like veal. Now he understood why the old hands on the
Saint-Paul
spoke so highly of turtle meat. The women ate heartily too. He took another piece and sprinkled seawater on the still uncooked strips, to salt them. After so many days of surviving on shellfish, bits of fish and tough under-cooked meat, he felt his mouth water in anticipation of the taste of the grilled meat.

The men had still not come back, and the women had eaten their fill and gradually moved away to sleep under the trees. Only the night before, their sister or their cousin had died, and yet they had devoured their food and eaten as much as they could. Narcisse carried on cooking and savouring his turtle steaks, less greedily now, sensing his strength gradually coming back. He was starting to feel fit again, fit as he had been before the march to the Bay of Abandon, before the fever, before the hunger of his first days here, and before the fatal crossing from the Cape. Licking his greasy fingers, he forced himself to take yet another piece, telling himself that any meat left over would only rot in the sun, but he couldn’t eat another mouthful. When would there be another feast like this? He walked back to his hut and went straight to sleep.

Later that afternoon, when the heat had gone out of the day, he began to wake gradually from his slumber and realised his hand was on his cock. He pressed a little harder and felt it stiffen in response. A shiver of well-being coursed through his body and he felt himself swell with pride. Sheltered from prying eyes in his make-shift hut, his eyes half-closed, he carried on. After all, what was he doing? Only what he used to do on board ship, at night in his hammock, when he wasn’t too exhausted, and when he couldn’t wait any longer for the next round of shore leave pleasures. Before the whore in the Cape, there had been the one in Bordeaux, a large placid woman plying her trade in one of the port’s whorehouses, where he and his companions had celebrated being paid just before they left for China. And before Bordeaux, there was Nantes, and others before that. But he couldn’t recall any of them in detail. Only the woman in the Cape, barely seen in the dim light of a candle. The fifteen minutes he had spent with her came back to him.

As his hand moved up and down, he saw himself again in his hammock on the
Saint-Paul
, returning excited from his visit to the tavern in the African night. The small courtyard with the shack, the straw mattress – he saw himself being careful not to move about too much under the covers, not wanting to draw attention to himself and become the butt of his shipmates’ jokes. Since his arrival here, he had been living among these naked black women, but he did not think of them as women. He felt no desire of any kind for them, they seemed to belong to another species. That was why he had grown used to living naked in their midst so quickly. He and his shipmates used to make jokes and claim they were capable of having sex with just about any kind of creature. Some of them would still refuse the “black stuff” in the whorehouses of the Cape, but not him. The women of the tribe, though, these women who did not cover themselves at all, who lay down with men without any attempt to be discreet. No, he could never think about it.

So long as he was here, the only possibility was abstinence – or this solitary pleasure he had become used to. He moved his right hand, provoking familiar sensations, instinctive and pleasant. Ever since he had been stranded here, he had known no pleasure at all. Only fear, hunger, pain, thirst, boredom, fatigue, despair, bitterness, misery. One after another, and sometimes mixed up together. Never a moment of joy. And now, with this pleasure he accorded himself, he was filled with a feeling of satisfaction: putting all his cares out of his mind, he concentrated on obeying the burning demands of his flesh.

What was there in this to feel proud of? And why could he not take himself back to that straw mattress in the Cape, his body moving urgently against the woman’s black body? Try as he could, all he could remember was the night one week later, when they had finally reached the temperate latitudes again after the squalls and snow flurries since the Cape. Demands on the crew were lighter, and he had finished his watch and gone back to the crew’s quarters in the ’tweendecks. Taking off his clothes, he hung them on a nail and groped his way towards his hammock where he lay down under the meagre covers and touched his hand to his drawers. Listening attentively to his own breathing and the creaking movements of the ship, he was transported once again to the whorehouse in the Cape to take his three guinea’s worth a second time from the woman whose services he had paid for. And now, lying in the hollowed-out sand that served for a floor in his makeshift hut, he saw himself again in his hammock, completely absorbed in his solitary pleasure, trying not to wake the others.

He closed his eyes, spread his legs, and with bated breath, emptied his mind of all else.

Afterwards, curled up into a ball and back again in North Bay, he began to cry. The tears flowed freely, and just as he had earlier surrendered himself to pleasure, now he wept with abandon. It was as if the tears running down his cheeks were carrying all the helplessness he felt: his inability to live with the tribe and the impossibility of living without it. He had gradually become accustomed to the physical suffering, the uncertainty of his fate, to his nakedness and the revolting food. But immeasurably more painful than any of this was the absolute isolation: he realised that he was condemned to live utterly without human relationships. Friendship, companionship, love, understanding, respect, seduction, sex, the whole range of human emotions; from now on they were beyond his reach. And there was no one to share his experiences – that was what caused him the most profound despair. In these tears of self-pity there was some comfort to be had.

The village curate used to tell the boys that doing bad things at night in their beds would make their guardian angel cry. Well, let the angel cry then! Let him cry too. Or else, let him come and save Narcisse instead of staying up there safe and sound in heaven.

Not once had he seen any of the savages in the tribe crying. No, he had nothing in common with them. He wanted nothing to do with any of them, their women, their daughters. He would remain alone, with his solitary pleasures, his lonely musings, his worries, his plans and his memories.

The tide was coming in and he got up and went to wash himself off in the waves. Waiakh came over to him, wanting to play, but he refused to acknowledge the boy and carried on walking into the water until Waiakh could follow him no further. He went deeper, until the water came up to his chin. In the distance, the waves were breaking on the reef, fragile white hills disappearing and re-emerging on the horizon. A frigate bird hovered up above, only to be joined before long by a second bird in an elegant dance in the sky. What if he just stayed here and waited? He could not swim. The water would come up slowly, it would reach his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Just a small amount of courage and determination, that’s all it would take. To wait until the warm sea engulfed him, set him free.

A wave came up and filled his mouth with seawater. He spat it out, turned round to face the horizon and murmured: “My name is Narcisse Pelletier. I am a sailor on the schooner
Saint-Paul
.”

London, 2nd August 1861

Monsieur le Président,

Your letter of the 25th July was awaiting me at the hotel. I must protest, sir, you are too generous with your praise and that I am undeserving of the compliments you pay me for the progress Narcisse has made in Australia. My more recent letters will have given you invaluable information on this subject and will, I hope, have addressed some of your questions and suggestions. I am deeply grateful to you for your part in this dialogue conducted across the oceans, and I look forward to our correspondence being conducted henceforth with greater ease now that the vast distance that separated us has been so much reduced.

These three days in London have passed like lightning, amid much confusion.

We disembarked from the
Strathmore
early in the morning and travelled by carriage from the docks to the Savoy. Narcisse gazed at the warehouses, the factories and smoke, the parks and blackened buildings, the palaces, the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the grey skies, the crowds, children, horses, women in their hats, the crossroads, constables, horse-drawn carriages, shops, tree-lined avenues and gentlemen dressed in black. This spectacle of a capital of Empire seemed to plunge him into a stupor. I had to take him by the arm and lead him out of the carriage and into the hotel, and then across the great hall and up to his room, where he went over to stand by the window. He remained there, standing motionless and silent all afternoon, watching the street scenes.

For in truth, what does he know of our world? An isolated house at the end of a sound, a clipper, and a glimpse of the small town that is Sydney? And now to find himself here, in what is perhaps the world’s largest and most modern city. I had not previously given this much thought, but even so, what could I have done?

While Narcisse was gazing at London, I made arrangements for our journey to France, on the new railway from London to Dover, and again from Calais to Paris.

Within the pile of letters handed to me by the concierge was an envelope marked from Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie. I picked it up, my heart in my mouth. I trust that you will understand why I opened this missive from the mayor of that town before I turned my attention to your own letter. The mayor wrote:

“
Monsieur le Vicomte,

Your letter posted in Valparaiso on the 22nd June has reawakened sad memories. The person whose past you seek to establish is most certainly Narcisse Pelletier, born on the 13th May 1825, the youngest son of a shoemaker of excellent repute in this town. He enlisted as a sailor at around the age of fifteen, and sailed first as a cabin boy and then as a sailor on various ships. With the fearlessness of youth, he signed on willingly for a series of long voyages, finding the time occasionally to return to the embrace of his parents, brother and sister between voyages.

He embarked in Bordeaux on the schooner
Saint-Paul
bound for China and perished at sea between the Cape of Good Hope and Java on the 5th November 1843. The date and the circumstances of his demise are recorded thus on the death certificate.

His whole family and all of Saint-Gilles were devastated at the loss of this fine young man who left only good memories of his all too brief life. His parents have never fully recovered from this loss; they feel it keenly even now, eighteen years later. The birth of grandchildren, of whom one is named Narcisse, has done little to ease their suffering.

I therefore did not wish to speak to them of your singular request, the motive for which I have not managed to fully grasp. I fail to understand why this tragic event from so long ago should be revived. I beg you to explain to me the reasons for your enquiries and entreat you not to undertake anything ill-conceived. We must avoid inflicting further unnecessary suffering on this unfortunate family. If, as I imagine, you have gleaned some information on Narcisse’s last moments from someone who was witness to the event, I urge you to inform no one but me and to accept that I should be the sole judge as to whether or not the Pelletier family should be informed.

I appeal to your humanity, and in the hope of receiving further explanations from you,

I remain…”

Upon reading this, I felt an urge to throw myself upon Narcisse, to give him back his name, his age, his past, and let him know that his parents are still alive. But I restrained myself, and forced myself to reread the letter and reflect upon it. Why had the mayor used the words “perished at sea”? Both the governor and I had always assumed that Narcisse was the sole survivor of a shipwreck – or that he was the only one to have survived a sojourn among the natives. The mayor implied that he had died of illness or as a result of an accident aboard ship and that the ship had continued on its journey. The captain had made a report, noting the exact date, and had completed all the formalities. A sailor who perishes aboard ship is buried at sea. How could Narcisse have survived? Something was amiss here and I could make no sense of it.