What Became of the White Savage (35 page)

Twice he has made the impossible crossing from one world to the other. In order to live with the savages, he must have had to forget everything of his life as a sailor – at what cost to him we shall never know. Returned once more to the world of the white man, he instinctively refused to endure again a similar ordeal, and sought refuge in forgetting. To answer would have meant lowering the drawbridge of his fortress and allowing the sailor and the demon to face each other in mortal combat. His sanity would not have survived.

Her Majesty had been able to open a postern and catch a glimpse of what lay on the other side: perhaps this was because her power and status made her seem unreal to him. And in his compassion for his workmate’s suffering at the loss of his child, Narcisse let down his guard for a moment and let slip a fragment of his Australian tale, the existence of his two children. But it was only the intensity of these emotions that freed him to speak of these things. I have been questioning him for six years and he has confided nothing to me. Silence is the key to his survival.

And now I begin to wonder what would have become of him if Wilton-Smith’s expeditions had succeeded in bringing his children back to him. Would he have been carried away by the joyous emotion of the reunion? Would he have been overwhelmed by the intrusion of his Australian past into his new life here? To what unsuspected hazards would my naïve desire to do good have exposed him? Would he have found the words to say to his children: “Speaking is like dying?” And in which language?

He could neither answer my questions nor leave them unanswered. And so, he has fled.

I sense that we will see him no more. Neither the police, nor the mayor of Saint-Gilles have received news of him and nor indeed has anyone else. I am much affected by this dramatic turn of events and am returning to Vallombrun, where I hope to be able to confirm what I believe I have understood.

Among all the questions which I now know he will never answer is one in particular that causes me great pain. His attitude towards me has always been genial but reserved, never revealing anything of his deepest emotions. What have I been to him all these years? A friend? An older brother, albeit one who is a mere four years older than he? A mentor? A persecutor? An instrument of fate, devoid of meaning? All of these things at the same time?

All that is left for me is to pray that Narcisse Pelletier finds peace and tranquillity, and an end to his tribulations. And to ask that he never again has to utter those terrible words: “Speaking is like dying.”

May God come to his aid.

I remain your faithful servant…

Narcisse was a boy of eight when his uncle died, and he no longer remembered him very well. But he hadn’t forgotten the short walk to his uncle’s small house at the edge of the village and the countless adventures to which it opened the door. Narcisse’s parents and other relatives had never travelled; they knew only of life in the Vendée. But his uncle had once been a grenadier; from the windows of the house at the edge of the village, Narcisse could see beyond the surrounding farmland to distant battlefields and German forests. The old grenadier liked to tell of his campaigns, and the boy would listen avidly as his uncle talked of taking the enemy by surprise, of fording rivers and entering victoriously into towns whose names they never knew, of young generals reviewing the troops, of the heady thrill of battle, the smiles of the girls serving in the mess and of the camaraderie in camps a world away from Saint-Gilles.

The child listened with rapt attention to the grenadier’s tales: he heard of a duke’s palace sacked in Pomerania, of surgeons tending the wounded in the baroque splendour of a Bavarian monastery, of dark days spent crossing mountains deep in snow, of a bivouac beside a town in flames, the town destined to fall the next day, of cannons wrested from the enemy. His uncle talked of the forever-deferred dream of invading England, of the heavenly sight of bell towers with their blue and gold curves, of trumpets and fifes sounding the charge, the smell of powder, the fury of hand-to-hand fighting – and then of being wounded, lanced by an uhlan’s sabre slicing deep into his right arm, the arm that now hung limp and useless… he had no regrets. Sometimes he would brandish his boots and sing their praises, as if he had worn only that pair to trudge across half of Europe and bear arms in the name of the Empire for five years – and the child believed it all.

Grenadier Pelletier’s favourite memory was of a reconnoitring exercise in Bohemia with three comrades. Cutting through the woods, as they rounded the bend of a sunken lane, they came face to face with a carriage drawn by four horses. The grenadier had the presence of mind to take aim at the postilion, who stopped his team, and fearing his last hour had come, fled into the forest. A face appeared at the window of the carriage, a terrified young woman wrapped in a capacious blue coat, pleading with them in a language they did not understand. Then, a boy of about ten, her brother probably, poked his head up, making a brave show to demonstrate that the young woman was not alone. With no orders for such an encounter, the soldiers decided to escort their captives back to camp. Pelletier installed himself as postilion and forbade anyone to climb in with the prisoners as he drove them the two leagues to their camp. The colonel was dining in his tent when the carriage drew in. Hearing the commotion he came outside and gallantly offered his hand to the young woman. And then, before inviting her and her brother to dine with him, the colonel publicly congratulated Pelletier for his audacious actions.

“Just imagine it, lad! I stopped her from running away. A countess. Her life changed for ever, and all because of a young chap from Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie!”

And as the old soldier’s tales unfolded, Narcisse thought of his father, always grumbling about the poor harvest and the lack of business in his workshop.

Narcisse had always known that he would travel. At twelve, when he’d wanted to sign on as a cabin boy, his father had said no, and again at thirteen and fourteen. At the age of fifteen, Narcisse convinced his father to let him go. And since then he’d seen Nantes and China, Aden and Bristol, Ceylon and Barcelona, the Cape and Bordeaux. He’d travelled to more lands and crossed more oceans than his uncle had ever dreamt of seeing.

If it hadn’t been for that countess in a sunken lane in Bohemia one autumn evening, a blue coat, a terrified woman pleading for mercy in an unknown tongue at the hands of Napoleon’s soldiers… Narcisse had heard this story so many times that he felt as if he’d been there himself, as if he’d been one of the grenadier guards fighting alongside his uncle, or the boy, his frightened face barely glimpsed, determined to hide his fear and protect his sister.

What did he know of that evening in Bohemia? Everything. He could conjure every detail: the smell of the horses, the fainthearted coachman, the countess with her dishevelled blonde curls, her perfume, the rustling of her silk gown, the sniggering uncertainty of the French soldiers at a loss for what to do, the mud-spattered uniforms, the little boy’s proud expression, the colours of the fallen leaves, the tolling of a bell in a nearby village, and that anguished voice imploring the soldiers to show mercy…

Who could have imagined that a sunken lane in Bohemia would have led him to this remote desert at the other end of the world?

He could not deny that the immensity of Australia filled him with dread. But he had wanted to travel; this was the life he’d chosen. He’d lost part of one earlobe, but his uncle had lost an arm in his campaigns. He’d walked barefoot across the desert, but how far had they actually gone? Probably not even as far as from Nantes to Saint-Gilles. Grenadier Pelletier had marched across Europe for five years and he certainly hadn’t had a comfortable bed to sleep in every night and three square meals a day.

Narcisse tried to see himself as an old man, telling tales of his voyages some day in Saint-Gilles. What would he say about this moment? Would he admit that he was terrified every day, every minute, and hope that the children didn’t believe him? Would he make a joke of it, find the humour in these dark days and nights: “Stark naked? Yes, naked as the day I was born, the whole time!” Or would he hide it all away for ever, bury all that he’d endured in a well of terror and anguish never again to penetrate its depths?

As a child he’d never thought to ask his uncle what became of the countess – nor even how he’d known that she was a countess at all. In the story, she simply disappeared at dusk on the arm of the colonel, into his tent, with her brother as chaperone. Had Grenadier Pelletier set off the next day to cross the Elbe or the Danube? Had the colonel sent the young woman back into her caleche on a secret mission, or dispatched her to some wretched dungeon? In his childish imagination, he’d give different endings to the story, changing it depending on how he felt.

The countess appears at the window of her carriage wrapped in her blue coat. She looks at the grenadier who has taken aim at her coachman. The coward flees but the grenadier doesn’t fire. She gazes intently at the French soldier and speaks to him, terrified, knowing that he will not understand, pleading for her life.

And she will always remember it as the best day of her life, that day in Bohemia, in that sunken lane.

Narcisse listens.

Waiakh interrupts his reverie and hands him a bundle of sticks. Together they scrape off the bark and Narcisse shapes them into points with a sharpened rock. They have spent the whole morning hunting lizards and now they are tired and resting. Their catch was meagre: two lizards for Waiakh, none for him.

Bohemia recedes into a dreamland. He tries to conjure another pleasant memory, the image of the whore in the Cape. But he cannot summon it. He can no longer remember her face, her warmth, the pleasure it gave him.

Has he forgotten everything? He tries to recall the names of his shipmates from the
Saint-Paul
, but his memory refuses to yield them. The larboard watch? Surely he can remember them. There was a Pierre, Yvon. And the other one? The little one with a good voice? He doesn’t know. He can’t remember. How many were they?

He can’t remember the sailors from the
Saint-Paul
, the whore from the Cape. The Bohemian countess is still there somewhere, a vague presence. In his uncle’s memory or in his own? They are all shrouded in mist, wrapped in the same fog. He gives up trying.

Half-remembered images coalesce, dissolve and vanish, scrambling his past. He is losing his memory. He has no will, no strength to fight it. Like a vast wave, the tide of forgetting rises from the depths of a wide, steep-sided bay and he feels no anguish. Only indifference. What good are memories of the ’tweendecks, the Cape, Saint-Gilles or Bohemia? They are nothing but old tales, merging and fading, barely discernible in the swirling grey mists where dreams arise.

A countess in a blue coat at the window of her carriage.

A girl sitting on a coral block, dipping her finger in red clay and drawing semi-circles on his face and chest.

A shell on the sand, tinged with orange.

Letter from Charlotte de Vallombrun to the President of the Geographical Society.

Vallombrun, 7th March 1868

Monsieur le Président,

It is my sad and painful duty to inform you that my beloved brother Octave de Vallombrun has been recalled to God.

After his last visit to La Rochelle, he came directly to our brother’s house in Grenoble. There we celebrated Christmas together. Upon his return to Vallombrun he continued to take the long walks he loved so much in spite of the January cold and wintry showers. A chest infection set in upon his return from one such walk and the next day he was feverish. He struggled valiantly for three days, received the consolations of religion and gave his soul up to God on the 20th January.

He lies in the family tomb in the cemetery of Vallombrun.

For more than ten years, since before his sojourn in Iceland, I have witnessed the admiration and respect he held for you. Your correspondence, of which he was rightly proud, continued without interruption and he would often invoke your wise and kindly face in the course of our conversations. Of all his titles, the one of which he was the most proud was that of member of the Geographical Society.

Maître Vion, our advocate in Grenoble, presided over the reading of the will. Since I do not know if Maître Vion has been in contact with you, I am enclosing a copy of Octave’s last will and testament, which I beg you to read before continuing with my letter.

Last Will and Testament of Octave de Vallombrun

I, the undersigned Octave de Vallombrun, being sound in mind and body, in the presence of Messieurs Poullier and Dufourg, gentlemen of property, declare this to be my last will and testament and hereby revoke any previous will and testament.

I give and bequeathe:

1. To my coachman, Firmin Delessert, the sum of twenty francs, in addition to my clothing so long as the said Firmin Delessert shall be in my employment at the time of my decease.

2. To Félicie Sorel, who much more than a cook has been the soul of the château for half a century, the sum of sixty francs. No conditions are attached to this bequest.

3. To the curate of the parish of Vallombrun:

– the sum of fifty francs for the establishment of a perpetual mass to be sung with the children of the choir on the day of the anniversary of my death for the remission of my sins and that my unfortunate soul may rest in peace if God so wills it.

– the sum of fifty francs for the maintenance of the church and the presbytery

– the sum of fifty francs to offer succour to the poor of the parish, to be spent as the curate sees fit with no one family to receive a sum that exceeds five francs.

4. To be placed in the charge of the curate of Vallombrun, the sum of one hundred francs to provide a dowry for four or five virtuous and impoverished girls of this parish, the recipients to be chosen by the curate in consultation with the mayor.