Chapter 14. The Bay of the West

When I was forced to go to the Bay of the West, I had a greater opportunity to observe the countryside that I loved. Between the Western Forest and the sea, there is a band of volcanic rocks, some standing like the menhirs at Karnak, others affecting monstrous poses, one even looking like an enormous rose with a few broken petals. At high tide the sea prevents people who are fearful of the water from prowling around. Dominating the Western Forest is the signal post. Covered with swallows resting on its supports, the signal post appears from afar to be a gigantic tree with spreading branches, and from their resting places the talkative swallows gossip with each other.

The forest was beautiful. Lianas cover it with creepers twice a year, their branches floating in the air or thrown in mad arabesques. Almost all of them have white or yellow flowers, but different varieties of liana have differently shaped leaves. Some are like arrowheads in the tarot, others like lanceheads, and still others like grape leaves. Others have leaves that look like cut glass.

There is another creeper with grape leaves which are fragile and transparent and covered with a sort of down, like a French plum. It has flat, checkered seeds covered with a vermilion fruit, like the jellyfish that cyclones scrape up from the bottom of the sea and throw on the beach.

The woods are red with indigenous tomatoes about the size of French cherries. They climb high up through the shade, and, like strawberries, they put out fruit where the sun reaches through. There are figs which smell like ashes, fat mulberries covered with an odorless white coating like sugar, and yellow plums with an enormous round pit. Most people said the fruits weren’t fit to eat, but I liked them; indeed, I preferred them to European fruit. I particularly liked gathering them from bushes between the rocks in the profound silence of the forest. Then all I needed was a light breeze from the sea and some good letter from my mother or Marie in my pocket.

There are berries which look like black currants. They have a fragrant aroma, although each cluster of fruit yields scarcely half a drop of juice. It has the bouquet of a very strong madeira, and I believe it could be fermented to make a liquor that would comfort the sick.

When I walked in the Western Forest, I saw few niaoulis, which are uncommon there but plentiful on the high slopes that crown the Ducos Peninsula. On dark nights the niaoulis give off a phosphorescence, and in the light of the full moon their branches rise up weeping like the arms of giants crying over the enslavement of the earth.

In the midst of the Western Forest, deep in a gorge between little knolls still impregnated with the bitter odor of the sea, there is an immense tree very like a European olive tree, and its branches stretch out horizontally, like a larch. No insect ever lands on its bitter-tasting black leaves, and no matter what the time of day or season, there is a grottolike coolness in its shadow, refreshing to thought as well as body. Above it, enveloping a whole rock with its archings, was a banyan tree, which was cut down in the last year of our exile. Never have I seen stranger insects than those that lived in the clefts of worn-away rock under the shadow of that banyan tree. If we hadn’t been forbidden to have alcohol, I would have been able to preserve some of them.

Once and sometimes twice a year a gray snow enveloped the peninsula, sometimes ankle deep and whirling around. It was locusts. Noise scared them away temporarily, but they always returned, and eventually they devoured the forests and the cultivated lands alike. Leaves, vegeta¬ bles, tender grass, old bushes—everything except the trunks of the trees was eaten.

If they appeared a second time, it was because the eggs of the first wave had hatched in the bushes. They remained there wingless for a time before flying out to devour the second crop and then to go off elsewhere to destroy the vegetation of some other area, lay eggs, and die. Perhaps men could sweep the locusts into deep trenches, and cover them with enough earth to blanket the smell; then the locusts would become a rich fertilizer.

Nothing was as beautiful as the gray and turbulent snow of the locusts. Their uniform color filled the whole sky, and the insects filtered the sun’s rays, making it look as if the sunlight were coming through a sieve. From the sky, gray flakes fell in a strangely blurred chiaroscuro.

Only as a last resort did the locusts attack the caster oil plants that grew everywhere; and often they left those plants completely untouched. So caster oil silkworms could be raised in New Caledonia, and they are esteemed in the Indies almost as highly as the mulberry silkworms. For ten years I wrote asking scholars to send me caster oil silkworm eggs. In telling this story I beg the pardon of those savants who sent them to me, but they always sent the eggs first to Paris. From there they came through the mail to me half across the world, and they always died in transit. Yet ships came to Noumea which had just stopped at the very places from which those eggs had been sent to France. During the last year of my exile, after thoroughly cursing the manners and customs of scholars who do nothing the simple way, I found some caster oil plants covered with worms that looked like silkworm moths. Perhaps silkworms exist in the wild in New Caledonia, and I will know someday.

New Caledonia is the paradise of spiders, too, among them a silk-spinning spider. It spins a tent of gauze and might be useful for mankind. The natives respect spiders because they think spiders destroy cockroaches. They even allow an enormous, black, hairy-legged variety to run free in their houses for that purpose. The Kanakas also esteem a fat white spider, which looks like a giant hazelnut, for its fine taste; they esteem it as highly as the locusts, which they eat like shrimp.

Another spider is a real monster. It exploits the work of little spiders who live in its web and repair it. Does the big spider eat them eventually? Probably, unless their work is more profitable than the nourishment they provide.

At the top of the high knolls in the Western Forest, enormous rocks have collapsed like the ruins of fortresses and have been covered over with pink heather, fragile creepers, and fragrant flowers. Among those ruined rocks lives a brown spider, as hairy as a bear. The female attaches the male to her web, and when he no longer pleases her, she devours him. That is the opposite of the human species.

No New Caledonian insect has a venom that affects humans yet; they have known man for too short a time. Even the animals that use poisons against each other cannot harm man.

Even the water serpents pose no threat to man. Their fangs are too short, and their species is disappearing everywhere. Those serpents are large and very beautiful. Some have white and black rings; others have patches of white and black. Some of us tamed them, and for a long time I kept one in a water hole I dug, but I had to let it go free because my old cat was terrified by it and constantly provoked it by spitting in its face. The serpent might have ended up by smothering her in its coils; certainly it followed her movements with its little reptile eyes filled with an expression that held very little sympathy.

On the mountain slope near the prison was the post office, its veranda covered with creepers. To send a letter to France and have it answered took six to eight months. At the end of my stay in New Caledonia, it regularly took only six months. On mail days, we climbed that hill anxiously at the exact hour set. Oh dear, beloved letters! With what ecstasy I received them. My mother wrote me the longest letters, and I awaited news from her with great joy.

Another frequent correspondent was M. de Fleurville, the inspector of the Montmartre schools, who had taken charge of my affairs in Paris—mostly a certain number of debts. At his own expense he got my Contes d’enfants published; I had written it while I was in the Auberive prison. M. de Fleurville wrote to me in New Caledonia about new discoveries because he knew we were not allowed newspapers.

I am reliving those days. I am walking down the hill with my letters in my hands: Marie’s, full of flowers; M. de Fleurville’s, a good half of which he devoted to scolding me the way he had in Montmartre; my mother’s, in which she assured me she was still strong. At the beginning of last December she was still telling me she was well, just as she had during those years in New Caledonia, and forbidding anyone to tell me about her illness.

Coming back from the post office to the Bay of the West, I am following the edge of the sea. The pungent and powerful odor of the sea fills the air and smells good. Walking on the path, I hear guitar music

coming from L-’s hut played on the guitar Pere Croiset has made

here in Numbo. It is so nice on shore, but I cannot keep from thinking about the prisoners on Nou Island only two kilometers away across the water. They are forced to live under the most severe conditions and are far more afflicted than we are. It is there that the best of us are locked up. We are hungry for news of them, but news is difficult to get through a thousand obstacles.

I see those silent beaches at the edge of the sea, where suddenly a fight between crabs splashes the water under the mangroves. Nothing but wild nature and deserted waves exists any more.

And the cyclones. Once you’ve seen them you are sated with the terrible splendors brought by the fury of the elements. It is the wind, the waves, the sea, which the old songs sang about. A cyclone seems to carry you away amid the howling of a terrible choir; wings carry you, and they beat between the dark of the sky and the black of the waves. Sometimes an immense red fork of lightning tears the shadows and leaves a glimmer of purple against which the blackness of the waves floats like a mourning band. Thunder, the harsh sounds of the waves, the alarm gun firing in warning, the noise of water pouring in torrents, the enormous blast of the wind—all that is only one sound, immense and superb, the orchestra of frenzied nature.

Our first cyclone took place at night. Those are the most beautiful ones. On the Ducos Peninsula the barometer had fallen to its lowest point. No single refreshing breeze stirred, and the air had announced the coming cyclone since morning. The animals became uneasy, and everybody took his beasts into his own house. Having taken in my goat and my cats, I got an idea which I wanted to tell to Perusset, a former ship captain. There was no time to lose.

With some difficulty I followed the path to Numbo. Evening was falling, and the storm was beginning. I got to his house, one of the first houses on the side of the Western Forest where I used to live, and knocked.

“Who’s there in this weather? Idiot,” came from within. “Who’s there?” Still grumbling, Perusset opened his door.

“I came to look for you,” I said.

“Why?”

“The boat that guards the harbor isn’t rowing around any more. It won’t be in the harbor the rest of the night. On a raft we could float off with the cyclone and be carried to the next landfall. Sydney, probably. To an old sea dog like you they would give a brig to sail back and get the others.”

But I flattered Perusset in vain. I called him an old salt, an old pirate, and so forth, but my vocabulary was soon exhausted. Perusset simply looked at me silently. He was a scholar, and knowledge makes you think; it is a bar to action, for it prevents you from surrendering yourself gladly to the unknown.

Finally, very gravely, he said, “In the first place we have nothing to make a raft with.”

“There are some old barrels,” I said. “We could fasten them together.”

“Where do we get them?” he asked.

“Wherever we find them,” I said. “At the canteen. Wherever.”

“Even if we had them, how do we know where we’ll land?”

“Luck,” I said. “We must take our chances.”

“A thousand to none we’d die.”

“Well,” I said, “we’ll take the one chance you call ‘none.’ ”

Thus we argued while the storm unfolded and the rain began.

“Do you want me to escort you back?” Perusset asked. He was uneasy about the path.

“No,” I yelled. “I don’t need you.” I slammed his door shut in his face. I heard his lamp fall, poor old man. He opened the door, but I had already moved away, and I cried from afar, “I’m with many others.” I told him five or six names. “Go back. Eight of us are leaving.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I wouldn’t lie.”

But it wasn’t true. I was all alone, and when you’re angry it’s better to be alone. Keeping to the rocks, I returned to the Bay of the West. How beautiful it was. I no longer thought about Perusset or anything else. I looked not only with my eyes, but with all my heart.

Like night grabbing day the sea rose up on the rocks where I stood. Enormous claws of foam, completely white, stretched out toward me. From the waves came a sound like a death rattle deep in someone’s chest. I finally returned to my hut and changed clothes because mine were soaked.

The young people who were my students gradually gathered at my hut as the storm increased its intensity. They were afraid something would happen to me, so they came.

“We almost got bowled over by the wind,” they said.

“I know,” I answered.

And, I reflected, if only I had thought of those young people to crew my raft. If only Perusset’s title of sea captain hadn’t dazzled me. For there certainly was no question of navigating during a cyclone; you only surrender to it. Those young people would have found what we needed to make a raft, and then we would have tempted fate. Now there was no longer time to do it.

I began to look around to see as much as I had eyes for, to absorb this night in which everything collapsed, moaned, howled. Whatever you see at any given moment has its usefulness and beauty. Across the torrents of rain, as if across a crystal veil, the lightning bolts showed splendid with horror.

How silent it was the next day! Thrown together in the river mouth were flotsam torn from the bowels of the sea and pieces of wreckage from the peninsula and Nou Island. And the chance for escape during the cyclone had passed, for the guard boat had resumed its monotonous patrol.

On a branch torn from the forest a female bird sat on a nest above her little ones. The cyclone had carried them away without destroying their nest, and the little birds had not fallen out during their terrible voyage; the mother bird must have held them pressed down under her body. Among humans during fires or other disasters, some terrified parents forget their children while fleeing. I picked up the branch and fastened it to a gum tree as well as I could. The birds would be better off there than on the ground.

Month by month, deportees kept arriving at the Ducos Peninsula. When I first got there, few of the condemned of the Commune had yet been sent out. They continued to arrive until just before the amnesty which the people forced the government to grant.

From the time we first arrived, each mail brought illusions to the homesick and those hopes pushed them into their graves. Those exiles could have mastered their yearning to return if only they hadn’t nurtured premature hopes which disillusionment later crushed. In vain we cautioned them that the average deportation lasts ten years. We told them too much blood had flowed for the government to allow us to return. But they preferred to dream those fallacious dreams that killed them rather than to listen to the voice of reason. Too many times I walked in funeral corteges dressed in a clean white frock, the flower of a wild cotton plant in my buttonhole, mourning some father of a family of little children, for during the first days of exile it was the fathers of small children who were most likely to leave for the deliverance of death.

When I had disembarked on the Ducos Peninsula the first person I had asked about was Verdure. I had seen him only once since 4 September 1870, when we had gathered saplings for liberty trees from the garden of the Tuileries. My mother kept one of them alive for several years, but it perished in the glacial winter just before my return. During the days of the fighting, we hadn’t had enough time to see our friends, and I had hoped to find Verdure in New Caledonia and help him to teach the young people. But just before my arrival Verdure had died of grief at receiving no news from home. Only a few days after his death a bundle of letters arrived for him. Poor Verdure! Now he sleeps over there, and I took over his pupils alone.

Many of the best of us have stayed on in New Caledonia because they fell into the great sleep. Some of those ghosts are good, others terrifying. Muriot, the suicide, sleeps under a niaouli which twists its white, desolate branches like the limbs of some specter. Blanche Arnold, who lived like the sweet flowers on the liana, died on the voyage home. She does not lie in the ground; instead she sleeps under the waves. In the earth of New Caledonia little Th6ophile Place lies in his coffin, his tiny hands folded around the stanzas written in honor of his birth. Over his tomb, a eucalyptus grows. There lies Eugenie Tiffault, a beautiful girl with dark blue eyes who died at the age of sixteen. For her tomb Henri Lucien made a terra cotta statue which survived the cyclones until after our departure. The comrades on New Caledonia cultivated flowers on all the graves.

Down the hill from the cemetery, mangroves intertwine, sometimes beating back the ocean, sometimes being recaptured by the waves. Above the cemetery is a rock of rose marble on which I would have liked someone to have inscribed the names of those buried there.

Wreaths from France still cover the grave of Passedouet, the journalist. Passedouet died a little before I returned; he had been sick a long time, and his memory had failed. In spite of all his wife’s care, it seemed that his last moments were approaching and that he would never leave his bed again, so I was astonished when I encountered him at the Bay of the West, when only the evening before I had seen him look very ill. Now his mind was clear. He stopped to rest at the women’s huts in the forest, and he chatted almost the way he used to do, but he was very pale, and his legs were trembling.

I didn’t dare to tax him with explaining how he had undertaken this trip alone, but I suspected his wife must be very uneasy over his absence. So I proposed that I return with him to Numbo, where he lived, and he accepted.

Leaning rather heavily on my arm, he walked very well. When we reached the heights between the Ndie Bay and the Bay of the West, from where we could see the buildings of the convict prison on Nou Island, reddish on the horizon, Passedouet drew himself up to his full height. He stretched out his long, gaunt arm toward the prison, and said to me, biting off each syllable:

“Proudhon was right. Every reform we’ve ever tried to make keeps the same causes for disasters, the same inequalities, the same antagonisms. Proudhon said it: ‘The men who produce everything get only poverty and death in return.’ The best commercial treaties of a nation only protect exploiters. People will end all that. But how much pain, how much evil. ...”

Now reciting Proudhon word for word, now developing ideas in short phrases separated by rather long intervals, Passedouet remained standing there with his arm stretched out toward Nou Island. It was the Passedouet of the old days. But he was a phantom getting ready to rejoin the slaughtered of ’71. Several times he repeated: “Proudhon. Proudhon.”

Then he became silent, and said almost no word after that. We walked on to Numbo where, as I had expected, they were looking for him. He lived only a few more days, and we never knew why he had come to the Bay of the West.

But that is the way I remember him now: standing on the heights, his arm outstretched toward Nou Island and giving the last light of his reason, the last breath of his body, to the day of deliverance.

And it will come.

That same hope for liberty and bread was in the hearts of the Kanakas. They rebelled in 1878, seeking liberty and dignity. Not all of my comrades approved of their rebellion as strongly as I did. One day Bauer and I were talking about the revolt of the Kanakas, a burning question on the Ducos Peninsula. We started speaking so loudly that a guard ran over from the post office thinking that a riot had broken out. He withdrew, very disconcerted, when he saw there were only two of us.

As a general statement, Michel’s explanation for the Kanaka rebellion is sufficient, but more specifically, the French settlers were displacing the natives from the land; the introduction of a large number of cattle caused serious problems. The natives felt that French labor practices were, at best, deceptive, and the French males were casual in carrying off native women. Precipitating the insurrection was a serious drought in some areas in 1877, which caused French cattle to destroy native crops.

That argument was about not only the Kanakas, but also about a Kanaka play. Bauer accused me of wanting to put on a Kanaka play, and I didn’t deny it. We deportees had a real theater on the hill above Numbo. It had its directors, its actors, its stagehands, its sets, and its board of directors. This theater was a masterpiece, given the conditions under which we were living. Every Sunday we used to go to the theater. We put on everything there: dramas, vaudeville, operettas. We even sang fragments of an opera, Robert the Devil, although we didn’t have all the score.

True, the leading women usually had deep, booming voices, and their hands kept searching in their skirt pockets as if they were looking for a cigar. Even my court-martial dress, which was very long, left their feet uncovered to the ankles, for some of our leading ladies were tall. They lengthened their skirts finally, and then nothing was lacking in their costumes.

Wolowski trained the chorus. They were talking about an orchestra when I left the peninsula for Noumea. I had my own ideas for an orchestra: I wanted to shake palm branches, strike bamboo, create a horn from shells, and use the tones produced by a leaf pressed against the lips. In short, I wanted a Kanaka orchestra, complete with quarter tones. Thanks to knowledge I had gotten from Daoumi and the Kanakas who brought supplies, I believed I knew enough to try. But my plan was blocked by the Committee of Light Classical Theater. Indeed, they accused me of being a savage.

To some comrades I seemed to be more Kanaka than the Kanakas. They argued a bit, so to make the situation a little more interesting, I spoke of putting on a Kanaka play whose text was wearing out my pocket. I even talked about performing the play dressed in black tights, and I added a few more details designed to exasperate those people. The incident took its normal course, rousing my adversaries and amusing me deep within.

The revolt of the tribes was deadly serious, but it is better if I say little about it. The Kanakas were seeking the same liberty we had sought in the Commune. Let me say only that my red scarf, the red scarf of the Commune that I had hidden from every search, was divided in two pieces one night. Two Kanakas, before going to join the insurgents against the whites, had come to say goodbye to me.

They slipped into the ocean. The sea was bad, and they may never have arrived across the bay, or perhaps they were killed in the fighting. I never saw either of them again, and I don’t know which of the two deaths took them, but they were brave with the bravery that black and white both have.

There is the legend—perhaps it is a story—of Andia, the bard with long hair, Andia the Takala, who sang his songs and was killed in combat by the side of Atai' [a historical figure, the leader of the insurrection of 1878]. Andia had an olive complexion, and the build of a dwarf with an enormous head and crooked legs; his body was as crooked as a niaouli, but his heart was brave. In his blue eyes the light sparkled, and he died for liberty at the hands of a traitor, when Atai, too, was struck down. May traitors everywhere be cursed!

From the traditions of the Kanakas or from the resources of his musical ear, Andia discovered, or rediscovered, the lute. The Kanakas have their bamboo and shell instruments, and they also have a bagpipe; the legends say it was first made by Naina from the skin of a traitor. In this tradition, Andia made a lute, with strings of catgut taken from one of the degenerate, wild descendants of the cats Captain Cook abandoned in the forests here.

It took a traitor and a white military expedition to kill Atai and Andia. Under Kanaka practice a chief can be struck only by a chief or by someone appointed by another chief. One chief had sold out to the whites and appointed Segou to kill Atai, even giving him the weapon with which to kill him. Segou went out with the white militia columns and spotted Atai between the huts and Amboa; Atai was returning to his own encampment with some of his people. Segou ran out from amid the white soldiers and pointed out the great chief Atai, who was recognizable because of his snow-white hair. Atai had his sling wrapped around his forehead and carried a gendarmarie saber in his right hand and a small ax in his left. Around him were his three sons and the bard Andia, who was armed with a short spear.

Atai turned to face the column of whites and noticed Segou.

“There you are,” he cried out.

The traitor Segou faltered for a moment under the look of the old chief, but then, wanting it all to be over, he threw his short spear at Atai and it pierced the old chief’s right arm. Atai raised his ax in his left hand as his sons were shot down around him, one killed and the others wounded.

Andia lunged forward crying out, “A curse on you. A curse on you,” but he was shot dead instantly.

Then Segou moved in against the wounded Atai, and with his own ax struck blow after blow, the way he would have chopped at a tree.

Atai fell, and Segou grabbed at his partially severed head. He struck him several more blows, and Atai was finally dead. Seeing Atai fall at Segou’s hands, the Kanakas unleashed their death cry in an echo to the mountains. The Kanakas love the brave.

Atai’s head was sent to Paris, but I don’t know what happened to the bard Andia’s.

To keep memory alive, I have translated one of Andia’s war chants.

The Takata

Gathered adoueke in the forest,

Adoueke, the shield herb,

In the moonlight, adoueke,

The war herb,

The spirit plant.

The warriors

Divided adoueke.

It makes them fierce

And charms their wounds.

The spirits

Of their fathers

Make a storm.

They are waiting

For the brave.

The brave

Are welcome.

Friends or enemies,

They are welcome

Beyond this life.

Those who wish to live

Go back.

War is come.

Blood will flow

Over the earth

Like water.

The adoueke

Must be blood.

The Kanakan Insurrection of 1878 failed. The strength and longing of human hearts was shown once again, but the whites shot down the rebels as we were mowed down in front of Bastion 37 and on the plains of Satory. When they sent the head of Atai to Paris, I wondered who the real headhunters were; as Henri Rochefort had once written to me, “the Versailles government could give the natives lessons in cannibalism.”

After I had stayed on the Ducos Peninsula for five years, first at Numbo and then at the Bay of the West, I was allowed to go to Noumea as a schoolmistress. There it was easier for me to study the country, and I was able to see Kanakas of various tribes. I even had some in my Sunday classes, a whole horde of them at my house in Noumea.

Shortly after I left the peninsula, some of my friends who had been at Nou Island arrived there, and I went back to welcome them. It was a joyful occasion for the deportees. We loved them more than the others because they had suffered more. That made them as proud as they had been during the May Days. We sat at the edge of the sea on rocks, and events came back to us, rising like the waves.

After the human beehive of Paris, any crowd looked small to us. After we had crossed the entire world to New Caledonia, any voyage seemed short to us. Days became crowded together without our really thinking about them, as if we turned the hourglass each year. Days fell upon days in the silence, and all the past swirled around us like the gray snow of locusts.