What Became of the White Savage (26 page)

She rose – the audience was finished. Her final words were for me: “Viscount, I intend to recognise what you have done. You have rescued this unfortunate individual even though you were under no obligation to do so. You have devoted your efforts to him, you have looked after him as a brother. You have brought him back to his country. Indifferent to gossip and glory alike, you seek no reward for your act of generosity. I do not know if the French people will understand your attitude; indeed, I believe that their opinion matters little to you. Your Empress salutes your generosity of spirit, be she the only one to do so.”

I was surprised and moved in equal measure by these words from my sovereign, and I bowed deeply in response, preferring to remain silent rather than to utter a trite rejoinder.

“Take this ring as a token to remember me by. The colour of the stone will remind you of the sea.”

Her Majesty removed a gold ring decorated with diamonds and a sapphire from her middle finger. As she handed me the ring, both she and the Princess seemed moved and subdued by the strange solemnity of the moment. Narcisse was watching a flock of birds fly south, the wind rustling the leaves of an elm tree.

The hussar came back over to me, a sign that it was time for us to take our leave. Her Majesty had turned away and the Princess was declaring with a charming peal of laughter that she intended to risk playing the piano.

As we were walking back towards the pavilion, we heard the strains of a polka echoing through the trees. Narcisse turned round as we were about to cross to the other side of the hedge, and looked for one last time at Her Majesty. She was standing, her head half turned over her shoulder, watching him walk away.

We were preparing to climb into the carriage when the hussar took me aside:

“Monsieur le Vicomte, how can we do as Her Majesty commands? What employment is this chap able to sustain?”

“I do not know.”

“You cannot envisage him working for the government then, in the Council of State perhaps?”

“That would make him most unhappy.”

The officer gave me a disapproving look, believing that he had detected a note of impertinence in my response to his ironic suggestion. But I had been entirely sincere in thinking only of Narcisse; I could equally have pointed out that he did not know how to read. I continued:

“He is still… unfamiliar with paperwork and the written word. He is uncomfortable in a crowd, as he is when he is required to converse, or simply to listen to others. Manual work, outdoors would suit him. I cannot imagine him in Paris or in a big city.”

“Can he follow orders?”

“Perhaps not as a soldier should. But he is gentle, full of good will and he does what he is asked.”

“A position in forestry perhaps?”

“He has always lived near the sea. If you could perhaps find him a situation that would allow him to live by the sea…”

“Her Majesty has given you her ring, and we must obey your wishes,” concluded the officer with a curt movement of the head and a note of insolence that undermined his assertion.

While we were discussing the future, Narcisse was admiring the bay horses of the imperial carriage team. I wondered by what mysterious alchemy Her Majesty had obtained from him so many precious gems of information. As if without thinking and undoubtedly without realising, she had coaxed from Narcisse intimations that he had hitherto revealed to no one else. Ah, if only the sceptics from our session at the Society could have been present at this interview, how foolish they would have felt.

On the way back to the station, Narcisse asked me: “Will we see the Empress again?”

“I don’t know. I think not.”

It was the first time I had heard him use the future tense, the first time he had asked me a question or shown some interest in what was happening to him. He asked to see the ring, but the only light that filtered through the carriage’s narrow windows was a dull autumn glow in which neither the gold nor the stones shone. He lost interest.

Should I relay to you what he had to say about this memorable day? I trust that you will keep this in the strictest confidence, and that you will remain sworn to secrecy in the name of science.

“The Empress is a beautiful woman. More beautiful than Princess Pauline.”

I remain your faithful servant…

Throughout the days on the beach Narcisse had stayed in the shade as much as possible; he’d done all he could to protect his naked body from the sun. And yet this morning his skin was peeling. Burnt dark by the sun, it had blistered and was coming away in strips. The most painful areas were his shoulders, back, buttocks and thighs, the parts of his body that had always before been protected by clothes. And the new pink skin that emerged was even more sensitive, defenceless against the sun, sand, wind and salt.

His whole body was on fire. What could he do to soothe his burning skin? You could buy phials from the Chinese in ports all over the world, concoctions that gave protection against sunburn. But here? Plant sap or crushed leaves might work, but he knew nothing about any of these plants and he couldn’t risk picking them at random. He tried using the traces of fat on the underside of the skin of a cooked fish, but it seemed to have no effect.

The old woman had seen the state he was in but she offered no relief. He watched with disgust as she picked up a scrap of dead skin from the ground, chewed on it, swallowed and spat it out. What did she think? That he was sloughing off his skin, like a snake?

He thought of snakes shedding their skin with the changing of the season, hares changing colour, birds replacing their plumage. Was he to be transformed too? What unimagined metamorphosis was in store for him? What was it that he would cease to be? And what would he turn into? A caterpillar does not choose to be transformed into a butterfly. Would he have any more choice than a caterpillar?

Later that morning, an old man emerged from the forest. As soon as they saw him the women stopped what they were doing and came running over. Others awoke from their sleep or came out of the water; mothers stopped playing with their children. They clustered around the new arrival, eager to touch him, be near to him, talk to him, sing him a little tune. He walked slowly over to a lone tree and lay down underneath it. The women brought him water, fish, shellfish and twigs to make a fire near where he was lying. They sat down with the children, surrounding him and chattering incessantly all at once.

Narcisse went over to have a look. The man seemed old beyond imagining. His wispy hair was the colour of snow – unlike the tribe’s elder, the man he called Chief, whose hair was, if no longer actually black, still not completely grey. This man’s face was furrowed with deep wrinkles fanning out in every direction, making his eyes seem deeply sunken in the sockets. Age had withered the muscles of his arms and legs, leaving the excess skin hanging off his bones like clothes a size too big. All tattoos and markings on the skin were lost, indecipherable in this ashen skin that seemed already to be dead. He was missing the little finger on his right hand, like the carpenter on the
Saint-Paul
, and in his mouth there remained only a few rickety teeth. Unlike the other men of the tribe, who were all completely naked, he wore a thin belt of woven vines around the hips, a miniature rose motif suspended from the front of the belt.

Who was this ancient being?

Narcisse watched as the women scurried around, striving not merely to obey the old man’s wishes but to anticipate his every need, proud to be in his presence. It reminded him of the ladies of his church, those pious women thrown into raptures by the visit of an emissary of the bishop. The children, even those older than Waiakh, were carrying on with their games and paying no attention to the old man. He decided to follow their example and ignore him too.

In the afternoon, the old woman came to find him and signalled to him to follow her. She led him over to the old man who was still lying down, dozing lightly. Narcisse remained standing, revelling in his own size and strength as he looked down on the frail creature before him. The old woman intoned a short speech and he thought he caught the word “Amglo”. Did local etiquette demand that he be formally introduced to this elder? He bowed mockingly and announced in a loud voice: “Greetings, oh filthy Prince of the savages. I am Narcisse Pelletier, sailor on the schooner
Saint-Paul
. Your people are incapable of speaking normal language, so they call me Amglo.”

Something about the old man’s penetrating gaze made him feel uncomfortable. Disconcerted, he turned away.

All day long, the women fussed over the ancient visitor. Narcisse did not want to pay any attention to him; what difference did it make to him, one savage more or less? The old man hadn’t come here to see Amglo, to make plans for his future: he’d shown virtually no interest in him. Perhaps he was a shaman or a magician, come to console the women after the death of a woman in childbirth. Well, let them sing then, all of them! Let them sing their savages’ requiem. It would keep him entertained for a while.

Then, as he sat sucking on the remains of a large fish with bluish scales, he was struck by something. If this old man had come specifically to mourn the dead woman, or to mark Amglo’s arrival, or for both of these reasons, it meant that he must have been told about these developments in the tribe. Who had told him? And how?

He looked at the fragile old man; even the simplest movements seemed an effort for him. It was inconceivable that he could be living as a hermit in some corner of the forest. He would need other savages to help him hunt and find water. And with those small shaky steps, how could he have come here alone, walking for two, three days or more? There must be another group of savages with an encampment not too far from here, and he must live with them.

Narcisse thought back to Wanderer’s arrival when they had been at the water hole. At the time, he had supposed that the young man had been hunting alone for several days. But perhaps he had gone to visit his cousins, to greet the chief, to take a message, to look for a wife, or who knows, to seek the blessings of an ancestor.

There must be savages everywhere in Australia: other groups wandering around all over the place, along the coast, in the forests and mangroves, in the endless wastelands of the deserts.

The southernmost tribes, near Sydney, must be in contact with white men.

Could he dare to hope that he might be led from group to group as far as the English colony, or to its furthest outpost? Or perhaps he could send a message, from one tribe to the next, a message to his own kind, etched onto a piece of bark, alerting them to his presence?

He was jumping ahead of himself, getting carried away with a new plan, a wild hope based on two separate ideas. He had no means of fulfilling either of them; there would be no miracle. He must not let himself be duped. He had simply learnt that other tribes existed; they moved about, had contact with each other.

What if he were to go from one tribe to another? But even supposing all the savages were friendly, that they all welcomed him, how could he be sure that his new hosts would lead him in the right direction? Towards the south, yes, but did they move in straight lines?

Would it be safer to send a message? He tried using shells to scratch on a piece of bark and after many attempts, managed to etch a few lines. He would definitely write his name, but what else should he say, and to whom? He did not know how to explain where he was and the tribe kept moving their encampments. And even if he did manage to etch his name and an approximate map onto a piece of bark, with the idea of at least prompting a search, how could he explain the importance of this message to the savages? The urgent need to pass it from one black hand to another, until it reached a white hand? The bark on which he patiently engraved his name, carrying all his hopes, would it not just end up being used to light a fire?

Saint-Martin-de-Ré, 28th October 1861

Monsieur le Président,

Thank you for your letter of 10th September and for your explanation of the concerns uppermost in your mind at the plenary session. I fully understand that as chairman of the session you were of course subject to a host of contradictory considerations. Indeed, I am grateful to you for having taken the time to raise a matter that might otherwise have constituted a source of misunderstanding between us. The meeting occurred soon after the singular experience of those few days in Saint-Gilles and my view of the afternoon’s events must indeed have been clouded by the intense emotions to which I was prey. No doubt my desire to protect Narcisse Pelletier played its part too, as did my lack of experience in such affairs. My letter to you was written in the heat of the moment and was indeed lacking in perspective. As you know, the meeting was followed by another momentous occasion, the audience with Her Majesty of which I have sent you a full report. After all of this, I had little choice but to leave Paris in search of peace and quiet.

My sister Charlotte, whom I had not seen for four years, was expecting us at the Château de Vallombrun. She was eager to meet Narcisse: I had informed her of the essentials of our adventure and she wished to make the acquaintance of the hero of my tale. As you will have gathered from my prolonged silence, now that I find myself in the tranquil setting of the Château de Vallombrun, I have taken the time to reflect upon matters.

We have installed Narcisse in a guest room. He takes his meals with us, and our staff treat him as they would any other guest. For the first few days here, he seemed content to savour the sights of the trees in their autumn colours, the meadows and hedgerows, the village fountain, the streams and the country paths. From some of the hilltops near the chateau, one can make out the snowy peaks of the Alps. I noted with some surprise that we are no longer separated from the mountains by the border of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia: our Empire has expanded and the border has retreated to the highest peaks, beyond the river basins of the Isère and the Arve. While I reflected upon all of this, Narcisse gazed uncomprehendingly at the white substance on the horizon.