The Prospector Read Online Free

with her black eyes, shiny as stones, and I know she feels as much admiration, as much fervour as I do. Then the evening draws out, the golden light of sunset recedes imperceptibly from the garden, drawing flights of birds along with it, bearing the cries of field workers, the rumble of ox carts on the sugar-cane roads off into the distance.
    Every evening brings a different lesson, a poem, a fairy tale, a new problem, and yet today it seems as if it was always the same lesson, uninterrupted by the burning adventures of the day, by the wanderings out as far as the seashore or by dreams at night. When did all of that exist? Mam, leaning over the table, is explaining arithmetic by placing piles of beans in front of us. ‘Three here, I take two away, and that makes two thirds. Eight here and I put five aside, that makes five eighths… Ten here, I take nine away, how much does that make?’ I’m sitting in front of her, watching her long hands with the tapered fingers I know so well – each one of them. The very strong index finger of her left hand, the middle finger, the ring finger encircled with a fine band of gold, worn with water and with time. The fingers of the right hand, larger, harder, thicker, and the ring finger that she is able to lift up very high when her other fingers are running over the ivory keyboard, but that will suddenly strike a high note. ‘Alexis, you’re not listening… You never listen to the arithmetic lessons. You won’t be able to get into Royal College.’ Is that what she says? No, I don’t think so, Laure is making that up, she’s always so diligent, so conscientious about making piles of beans, because it’s her way of showing her love for Mam.
    I compensate for it with dictations. It’s the moment of the afternoon I like best when, leaning over the white page of my notebook, holding the fountain pen in my hand, I wait for Mam’s voice to begin inventing the words, one by one, very slowly, as if she were giving them to us, as if she were drawing them with the inflections and syllables. There are the difficult words that she’s carefully chosen, because she makes up the texts for our dictations herself: ‘wagonette’, ‘ventilator’, ‘half-hourly’, ‘cavalcade’, ‘equipage’, ‘fjord’, ‘aplomb’, and, of course, from time to time, to make us laugh, ‘beef’, ‘brief’, ‘leaf’ and ‘lief’. I write slowly, as best I can, to draw out the time that Mam’s voice will resonate in the silence of the white page, waiting also for the moment when she’ll tell me, with a little nod of her head, as if it were the first time she’d noticed, ‘You have pretty handwriting.’
    Then she rereads the dictation, but at her own rhythm, marking a slight pause for the commas, a silence for the periods. That cannot come to an end either, it’s a long story she tells us, every evening, in which the same words, the same music is repeated, but jumbled up and arranged differently. Nights, lying on my cot under the veil of the mosquito net, just before falling asleep, listening to the familiar sounds – my father’s deep voice reading a newspaper article or conversing with Mam and Aunt Adelaide, Mam’s buoyant laughter, the distant voices of the black men sitting under the trees listening for the sound of the sea breeze in the needles of the she-oaks – that same interminable story comes back to me, full of words and sounds slowly dictated by Mam, sometimes the acute accent she pronounces a syllable with or the very long silence that makes a word grow larger, and the light in her eyes shining upon those beautiful and incomprehensible sentences. I don’t believe I go to sleep until I’ve seen that light shining, until I’ve glimpsed that sparkle. A word, just a word that I carry off with me into sleep.
    I like Mam’s