Gold diggers in French Guyana | other journal

When I was living in French Guyana, “Papa” Avitis was my landlord for a little over than two years. However, before he was introduced to me, I had already spent a whole year in Maripasoula without ever meeting him, or even suspecting his existence.

Finding somewhere to live was a real problem in this small village of the upper Maroni, isolated in the tropical forest. And, to tell the truth, it had not been easy to convince Avitis to let his hut to me. I wasn’t the only one to be looking for a house. Therefore, to make sure that Avitis wouldn’t promise his house to someone else, I rushed to bring the matter up for discussion although the house was still being built. To win his trust during our first encounter, I’d asked an acquaintance of his to introduce me to him. These precautions turned out to be useful, and Avitis ended up by giving me his word, which in Guyana is worth a contract!


During the long months that it took to finish building the house, Avitis stayed in it, with no other activities than keep an eye on the workers and vaguely take care of the garden. I would go to see him regularly to show him how anxious I was. The work was going so slowly that I even got to think it would never end. I thought Avitis had changed his mind and that he would never let this house out to me, because he might rather live in it himself. But one day the house was ready, and he told me I could move in.



Who on earth was Avitis old fellow who was such a riddle to me? He spoke a funny kind of Creole, and it was difficult for me to talk with him.

Like most of the old Creoles in the village, he came from Ste Lucie, an island of the West Indies. Like all the others, he had arrived very young in French Guyana, with a relative or a family, and had then spent his life looking for gold in the woods. And, according to him, he was still looking for some, in a place he had been familiar with for many years, which was located “deep” in the forest, near the trail leading to the village of Papaichton. Avitis had asked me several times to call a woman who lived in Cayenne and that he called his daughter. From the sound of her voice, this woman seemed to be fifty or sixty years old. Once Avitis’ messages had been passed on, we would have a little chat. But she never gave me any information about him. Even more, because of the questions she asked me, she gave me the feeling that she hadn’t seen Avitis for a good twenty years and that she only knew Maripasoula from the vague holidays memories of her distant youth.

One day, by chance, during my work at the people’s dispensary of the village, I discovered Avitis’ medical file, as I was sorting through the records. This file, started in 1987, was almost empty. At that time Avitis, who claimed he was eighty four, had come for a premarital examination! No one ever told me what had become of his young eighty five years old spouse, but whatever the case, either a widower or a divorcee, Avitis was now single.

     

Since I was curious to see my landlord in his natural habitat, I asked around for directions as to how to get to the site. On foot very early morning, I walked for two full hours following the big trail, right in the sun, before finding the landmarks indicated by a friend that would lead me to the small layon . The path went through a pretty forest area. After a few hesitations, I arrived in a sort of clearing, in the end of which was a very old carbet. Having heard his name called out, Avitis came to great me. He seemed surprised and amused by my unexpected visit. He had me come under his carbet. He had just finished eating.
     
He removed a pan of rice from the ground so that I could sit down, and explained that he had killed an agouti the previous evening. The hut was very small and cluttered with a number of old things. Avitis, though he was small, could hardly stand. There was no table or chair. And, to my great surprise, no hamac either. He had built a bed for himself, by slipping empty sacks of flour onto two long poles. The whole thing was maintained horizontally about sixty centimeter from the ground by small wooden forks stuck into the ground. He gave me a bit of water and sharpened a saber all the while exchanging a few words with me. He then took his gun and offered to go and visit his placer.
     
On the way, he explained that when he had retired, after over forty years spent working on big placers for different mine companies; he had come to settle dawn on this one, not far from Maripasoula. He had then gone into partnership with three other old Creoles, who were former fellow workers. Because of isolation, rum, money or rather gold and old rancours, the association was short-lived! And finally, Avitis stayed alone to work in a very rudimentary way.

Avitis knew by hearth the path that had been half covered with water because of the rainy season. Even barefoot, he walked much faster than I did. He stopped for a minute to show me a tomb lost in the vegetation: one of his former partner!

The ditch he was digging at that time was, as clean and heat as his hut was dirty and neglected. The place looked as if it had been swept. Shovels and pickaxes were carefully lined up in a corner. Avitis explained that it took him a whole day to dig the ground and carry the soil with a wheelbarrow to a small creek further down. He would spend the second day panning for gold. He then usually took the third day off to rest.

       

After he had shown me at great length what his work consisted in, we slowly went back to his hut. This time, he offered me a shot of rum and he took me back to the track, making me hurry a bit, for he was afraid I might not make it back to the village before night came.

Some time later, when I paid him a second visit, I again found Avitis panning for gold. Seeing him work like that, in the mud, badly protected from the rain and sun under his shelter made of palm leaves, I found it hard to believe that he could have been close to ninety years old. After we had exchanged the news of the day, I asked him jokingly how many grams of gold he had found that morning. He stopped and came over to me, and took out of his pocket a tree leaf folded in four, which contained his precious find of the day before…a few shiny specks.

       

What on earth could make him keep working the way he did with so little share of it? The rent I paid him every month was more than enough for him to live on. The small quantity of gold he must found didn’t bring him much more than a small allowance.

On my way back home, I thought about the fact that Avitis was not the only old Creole in the village to go on living alone in the depth of the woods, at over eighty years of age, digging up the ground in order to extract a few grams of gold a day.

What were they really after? Did they hope to make their dreams of wealth come true, at their time of life ?

I remembered all the stories about gold diggers I had read or had been told. How many of them among these men who, grams after grams, sometimes up to a fortune, how many have really made the most of it? To how many of them had gold offered a different life?

Were they continuing this work because they had to, or simply out of habit, because they had become incapable of doing anything else?

Weren't there other reasons? After having lived all their lives as hermits in the far end of forest and rivers, enduring hardship and solitude, were they capable of setting down in villages without feeling uncomfortable and displaced? They had stirred the soil; they had carried it from one side to another, and panned it carefully… Hadn't they simply got to like those activities so much, that they couldn't do without them?

What else could they have done these migrants, sons or grandsons of slaves…leave Guyana to go back to their sugar island? And with what future prospects? Cultivating a garden and digging a barren soil knowing that they'll find neither specks nor nuggets? And after all, looking for gold, and finding gold hasn't this become their only true pleasure of life?

Feeling that death was coming, was Avitis going to hide his gold in old bottles of rum and burry it in the depth of the forest, as it should be in all good gold diggers stories? Would he destroy, through this return to the earth, the fruit of his entire life of labor rather than allowing it might be stolen by other gold diggers or rather than letting his children enjoy it thus they were complete strangers to him?