©
Pierre-Yves Babelon
Madagascar Travel Guide
©
Pierre-Yves Babelon
I've lost track of time. We've been driving along this rough track for a long time and it's opened our eyes to the raw beauty of a semi-desert Madagascar. Destroyed by bushfires, the landscape has been taken over by masses of thorn trees and dried-up swamps.
Having got used to the arid charm of the plains of the bush, we leave the octopus trees and the rainbow-coloured, native birds behind and enter the coastal strip where the Vezo people liveand where isolation has preserved the traditions.
The colour of the lagoon runs into the sky, the frontiers between land and sea dissolve to become just a curious abstraction in one's mind. Helena awakes me from my colourful daydreams with the splashing of her footsteps in the water. Helena dances, whirling in front of me. After two days of tiptoeing about, we have become used to each other.
Helena is as timid as I am. She doesn't like big crowds and runs off as soon as her friends besiege my windswept bungalow. The little boys show off for my camera that's clicking away like nobody's business. They flex their biceps, showing their teeth and wiggling their bottoms...and then go red as beetroots when I smile at them.
As soon as I am alone again, Helena reappears.
She asks for nothing. No sweets, nor my horrible mosquito-repelling plastic bracelet, which seems to be irresistibly attractive to the other little girls.
I haven't heard a peep from her yet: the two of us are in silent complicity and she escapes only to return yet again. She's constantly on the lookout: worried, curious and full of energy. Maybe I'm imagining things, but I'm dead sure that she understands English really well.
I love Helena's silences. With her furrowed brow, bleached by the salt, her rounded cheeks the colour of pink caramel, this young lady with all of her eight years is incredibly beautiful.
I walk hither and thither across the sand that swallows our toes, amongst the wisps of straw. Towards the virtually self-sufficient Vezo fishermen who are bringing in their nets bursting with flashing silver filaments. Towards the ancestral gestures of the man carving a sailing boat from an unsinkable tree trunk. I observe the novice repairing the square sail of his outrigger pirogue and the child concentrating on pulling a bucket of water up from the well. Helena is here, she only runs off when there are too many people around us.
My bungalow is weightless, lifted by the salty wind that blows under the shutters. Under my mosquito net that looks like a hot-air balloon, I imagine harmonies in the murmuring of the wind. I wait for sunrise on the white beach. Before dawn, the sea is already metallic and shining. The yellow sail of an outrigger pirogue starts its return to the village. Opposite is Mozambique. Helena has fallen in behind me, her eyes still heavy with sleep.
