Pictures

On a clear day in the Indian Ocean, a fisherman in a pirogue saw the far-off spout of a whale and wondered when les biologistes would return. Henri had not seen them for two years. Jacques, Henri’s son, perched lightly in the highest part of the bow of the boat with a long spear in his hand, looking for squid in the shallow reef below them. Jacques was only eight, but his hands were as calloused as Henri’s. Other dug-out boats floated quietly nearby, but no one waved or called out to Henri and Jacques, though they all knew each other. They all paddled their pirogues slowly and silently, scanning the shallows for any sign of movement.
The clear blue water beneath them appeared empty except for the dead heads of coral covered in greenish algae, and clusters of spiny black sea urchins scattered across the sea floor. The wind cast ripples across the water, carrying the distant roar of the breakers that were farther out on the fringes of the reef. This particular cove with its dark shallows had once harbored many of the pale darting creatures, but every year there were less and less squid.
There was a splash and a shout from one of the other pirogues, breaking Henri’s train of thought. Henri and Jacques turned their heads and caught one tantanlizing glimpse of long, pale, shining tentacles dangling from the end of a spear before the two boys inside the boat pulled the squid off the hook. They slapped each other on the back and began to sing together in loud, lusty voices, their broad smiles visible even from a distance.
Jacques threw one quick anxious look over his shoulder at his father but said nothing. Henri reached down with the long thick pole into the water until he felt it touch the shallow sea floor beneath him and gave a good push. Under the pole a chunk of dead coral broke off and fell silently and slowly to the sandy bottom. The pirogue glided gracefully forward several yards and Henri pushed the pole down again, propelling the boat away from the other pirogues. On the beach, a group of laughing young girls was sitting in a cluster, braiding each other’s hair and laying seashells out on pieces of cloth to sell to the tourists who often walked the beach. Someone should scold them; they should be collecting from the traps, he thought. But the low wall of rocks arranged in a circle to make a shallow pool that trapped lobsters at high tide was obviously empty. There was no lobster or even the big white crab to be found on this side of the island anymore. Henri steered the boat farther away from the group of pirogues, but could still hear the sound of the two boys' singing.
In the late afternoon they headed home with their bucket full of fish, but no squid. Henri steered the pirogue around the south side of Nosy Nato, past the hotels and bungalows on the beach. A group of light-skinned, blond vazaha was lounging on the front porch of their bungalow at Chez Collette, and as they waved at Henri and Jacques gliding by in their pirogue,
Henri wondered again if the American scientists would return this year.
Last time, they had come after the summer storms of January and February were over and stayed until the end of June. A few days after Armine had left the hut, the American woman scientist had come to the village to see Henri. She must have cut through the middle of the island and wandered through the rice paddies until she spotted the little outcropping of huts on stilts among the palm trees. A thick mist hung in the air that day, and when she arrived her hair was stringy with moisture and her pale bare legs below her short pants were streaked with mud. As she came into the village, Henri could hear from his hut the sound of the children’s voices raised in excitement, asking, cadeau madam, cadeau s’il vous plaît?
“No, no, no,” she said, her accented voice carrying above theirs, “I have nothing. I have nothing. I am sorry.” She knew which hut was Henri’s, and she went straight up the path, telling the giggling children to go home but they all followed her anyway. She knocked with one hand and with the other fended off the curious hands of the children. As soon Henri came to the door the children ran, giggling louder than ever.
The American woman’s French was hesitant but she was not shy. She began to speak as soon as she saw him, but he interrupted her.
“Where is Armine?” he asked. She looked back at him. There were freckles and pockmarks on both her cheeks, and her eyes were a pale, oddly blank shade of blue that Henri thought rather ugly.
“Armine has gone to Antananarivo, with my husband.”
“Armine lives here,” Henri said angrily. He pointed at the hut behind him. “This is Armine’s home,” he repeated.
She shook her head. “This island is—“ and she spoke a few words of English. “Do you understand les changes on your island?” she asked.
He folded his arms across his chest and said nothing. Behind him, a six-year old Jacques sat naked on a log, listening. His dirty cheeks were streaked with tearstains and snot pooled freely under his nose.
“I will tell you,” said the American woman. “Because I am a scientist. I have studied why there are no poisson here. No calamar, no homard, because there are too many fisherman here. The fishermen should stop fishing. Do you understand?”
Henri did not reply immediately. "You do not understand Armine,” he said, finally.
“We have talked with Armine. We have told her about the university. Armine wants to be a student,” she insisted. “Armine will… find a good life, here there is nothing.”
Henri turned away, picked up Jacques, put him inside the hut and closed the door. He came back to where she stood outside the hut and folded his arms again.
“Armine would like her son to come to Antanarivo. She knows he will be a—a burden for you. Armine wishes me to take her son now and bring him to her.”
“No!” Henri shook his head vehemently. “Jacque is not leaving. You may tell Armine he is not her son now. He is my son.”
“But Armine—” she began, but Henri interrupted her again.
“You may leave now,” he said, backing away from her towards the closed door of his hut, “I do not want to talk with you anymore.”
A flash of anger crossed her face, but it was quickly replaced with a forlorn expression.
“Wait—wait! Please. I need to go to the airport, but it is too far to walk back the way I came to the ferry port,” she said pleadingly, her pale blue eyes fixed on his face. “I will pay you to take me to Sainte Marie by boat. Will you take me?”
She knew he could not refuse the money. They all walked together down to the beach where his pirogue was tied. Henri walked in front of Jacques with with his back very straight and his eyes fixed on the horizon, not looking around at the she-scientist. She trailed behind Jacques and occasionally muttered in English when her sandals became stuck in the mud.
In the pirogue she took her backpack off and pulled out a notebook and a camera. The tide was low and Henri had to use his skill with the pole to weave the boat through the shallows, avoiding sharp rocks and bleached heads of coral. She paid no attention to his movements, but sighed and clicked her tongue when the rocking of the boat jiggled her pen. Jacques crouched in the bow of the boat and faced her. She looked over the top of her notebook and saw him watching her.
“Châtaigne de mer,” she said grandly, pointing at a cluster of black sea urchins below them. Jacques looked over the side and followed her finger with his eyes. She raised her camera and snapped a picture of Jacques. Jacques froze and stared at her with wide, fearful eyes. She continued, “There are many, many sea urchins here. Do you see them? This means that all the animals that eat the sea urchins are gone. When there are no animals to eat the sea urchins, the sea urchins eat the coral. The fisherman must stop fishing here so that the reef will not die.”
“We are fisherman,” Jacques said, looking at his father.
“Yes,” she said, “But maybe soon you will go to school and then you will not have to be a fisherman. You will live in Antananarivo, the big capital city, in a big house with your mother. Would you like that?”
“Enough,” Henri said sharply, cutting her off. Just then the boat went over a big swell and tipped side to side precariously. She grabbed the side of the boat and looked frightened. She sniffled and blinked her eyes rapidly, then picked up her notebook again and began to write furiously. After a while, she closed her eyes and appeared to doze. An hour later, the airstrip was in sight and Henri steered the pirogue to shore. She didn’t wake up until the boat bumped the bottom and then she slowly sat up and began to gather her things together.
“We will come back to Sainte Marie and Nosy Nato soon to resume our studies, perhaps next year. We have important work to do here,” she said to Henri as she climbed out of the pirogue. "Perhaps you will change your mind about your son. Believe me,” she said, “Armine is very happy. You will see.” She gave Henri three 10,000 ariary notes and said goodbye. Henri and Jacques watched her walk across the dirt road to the airport office. Her bare legs were still streaked with mud.
She never turned around or stopped, so she must not have realized until much later that her camera was missing. Henri found it in the pirogue when he arrived back at the beach below the village. He brought it into his house and turned it over in his hands. He had never held a camera before, nor had he ever had his picture taken. He pressed down, and a flap in the back of the camera opened, revealing a strange, small yellow can nestled inside. As he took out the little can to examine it, a long, flat black tail came curling out from it, making a sustained clicking sound as it unraveled. He looked closely at the strip of film, recalling as he did the day that Armine had met the American scientists. They had approached her on the beach below the village and she had allowed them to photograph and examine Henri’s catch. Armine had posed for them, smiling her wide white smile, crouched in the sand where the fish were spread out around her. He should take the camera to the airport office on Sainte Marie, he thought. But he knew it was likely that an employee there would probably steal it before someone came to claim it. So for a week he did nothing.
Finally he came to a decision. One night after Jacques had gone to bed, Henri went outside to their cooking pit, still full of smoldering ashes, and stoked the fire with brush from the yard until the flames leaped high above his head. He took the camera from where he had hidden it inside the house and threw it into the fire. As he watched the black plastic begin to bubble and smoke Henri remembered how Armine had desperately wanted to see the pictures of herself. She insisted on going by herself to the scientists’ hotel although Henri told her she was a vain, silly woman and the scientists were not to be trusted. It was a well-acknowledged fact known by all the villagers that the foreigners’ cameras were evil. He did not understand why Armine would wish to have her image, her imprint, captured and taken away by strangers. Armine went to visit the Americans several times. She led them through the interior of the island to the quiet coves where the fisherman hunted and showed them the pits where the villagers disposed of fish bones and seashells, and Henri believed her when she said she only helped them because they paid her. But one day Armine did not come home at sundown. Henri went to the hotel to find her, but was told that the Americans had left Nosy Nato and had gone to the research station on Ile Sainte Marie. Henri would have gone to look for her there, but he was too late. The next day the American woman came to the village to tell him they had paid for Armine to leave the island.
Two years had gone by, and still he woke frequently in the middle of the night, his head filled with hazy images of the American scientist woman and her husband knocking on his door with the inspecteur de police right behind them, demanding to know what he had done with the camera. Tsy misy, I have nothing, he told them in his dreams. I have no camera. I have no pictures. Sometimes he dreamed that Armine came back with them, or by herself. In the dreams she never wanted to stay, she only wanted the camera.

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Henri and Jacques steered their pirogue up to the beach outside the village just as the sun was setting. Henri carried the bucket of fish, and Jacques carried the pole and the hooked spear, their two most treasured possessions.
When they got home, a big green chameleon was clinging to the doorframe of the hut with its mitten-like hands and feet, the tail curling inward on itself like the number 6. Its face, like all chameleons, had a mouth that turned downward at the sides in a melancholy expression; but the villagers believed that chameleons brought good luck, and also ate bothersome insects, so Henri and Jacques left it alone. Henri built a fire in the pit and Jacques began to scale and clean the fish. Henri put a pot of water over the fire and poured rice in the boiling water from an aluminum cup. Over their heads, far above the tops of the swaying palm trees, bright stars appeared one by one in the darkening sky. The glow of the fires of their neighbors was visible from the yard where they sat. One clear nights, the sound of the surf floated up from the beach and mingled with the sound of nearby human voices, but tonight everything was oddly muted and the humid air made Henri’s back ache very badly.
Suddenly Jacques gave a sharp cry and clutched his hand. He had cut himself with the knife. Henri grabbed Jacques' arm and examined the wound closely. It was bleeding freely but did not appear deep. He bound Jacques' hand tightly with a rag and for a while they sat together in the dim light and watched the dark blood soak into the cloth.
Jacques broke the silence. “Will I be able to use the spear tomorrow?”
Henri said, “Perhaps you will steer the pirogue and I will hunt with the spear until you can use both hands.”
“If I had a wound that was very bad, what would we do?” Jacques asked him.
Henri took the bowl of fish from Jacques and resumed preparing them for supper. “I would take you to the big church on Ile Sainte Marie where the pastor would find a doctor.”
“What if it is summertime, and the doctor and the pastor have gone back to the mainland? They say the doctor goes back and the church closes when the cyclones come.”
“Yes,” said Henri, “The doctors and the pastors never stay forever.”
“We will stay forever,” Jacques said, “And I will be careful. I will never cut myself again and I will always hunt while you guide the pirogue.” He stood up and used his uninjured hand to stir the simmering rice.
Henri finished preparing the fish and as he put them in the pan and laid the pan over the fire, it occurred to him for the first time that a scientist was like a doctor and a pastor put
together. The scientists, he thought, show us the wounds because they think we don’t see the blood. Then they ask for our faith but they give us no proof that the medicine will work.
That night when they went to bed, Jacques fell asleep quickly as always, but Henri lay awake for a long time with his aching back, wishing it was morning. He had an idea to go to a fishing place his father had visited when Henri was about the same age as his own son now. This fishing spot was a couple hours’ paddle up the coast but Henri was sure they would have it all to themselves if they started early.
Over and over he kept picturing in his mind’s eye a school of squid darting through clear turquoise water. Henri saw himself returning to the village with Jacques, both of them carrying a bucket in each hand with pale tentacles drooping over the side. He pictured himself selling the squid to the cook at Chez Colette, whose salade de calamar was famous on the islands of Ile Sainte Marie and Nosy Nato. Lying on the pallet next to Jacques, Henri began to feel very anxious and agitated. The pictures in his head reminded him of Armine’s obsession with seeing the photographs of herself. But while those images of Armine would remain frozen and unmoving, Henri saw himself guiding his pirogue through a maze of rocks and coral at low tide. This is what he told himself as he lay in the darkness next to his son. Then Henri got up, went outside and sat on the log in front of his hut until he saw the dim light of dawn in the sky above the palms. He got to his feet and as he reached out to grasp the rusted handle on the wooden door, he saw the big green chameleon, still clinging stubbornly to the side of the house. It gazed back at Henri but didn’t move, then very slowly blinked its small eyes.
Gently, so that he wouldn’t shake the doorframe, Henri opened the door of the hut and called Jacques.