ITINERARY BEAUTIFUL MAURITIUS 20 Fiction or reality? We no longer know which of the two brings the other to life. Everything is there: characters and settings, breathing, alive. The Mon Repos family estate, the high white gate, the ranks of 44 mango trees (among them the well-liked “Jesus”, which shelters colonies of ants), the Creole house, with its characteristic frieze over a zinc roof, stronghold of the Gentils since 1850. “It was here that my great-uncle Philippe Gentil Antoine Gentil (an engineer trained in Europe, who returned to Mauritius to run the family’s small agricultural estate). “Every time I open this door, I see us again: my father at the wheel, my mother and I beside him, and my three older brothers in the back. Our childhood was filled with great, extraordinary joy,” smiles the writer, who promptly settles behind the wheel of the “Anglaise” and sets out towards the Pamplemousses Garden – the world’s first tropical botanical garden, created in 1770 by Pierre Poivre. “Back then, we would cross the sugar cane field behind the house to reach the Garden. It was our playground. I know its every corner. Nature taught me so much more than school, which I hated as a child. I left before the baccalaureate and, at 17, found myself working as a welder in a shipyard, among other things... Nature teaches us observation, patience, acceptance (think of cyclones as they destroy everything in their path), ephemerality... Why leave behind that which you love? I’m not nostalgic, though. Or maybe I like the light veil that memory places over the present. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to write.” CENTRE OF THE WORLD “Mauritius is the centre of the world, and Pamplemousses is the centre of the centre,” writes Gordon-Gentil. It is from here that he draws his “immense mixed-race joy of living” and his inspiration. He has trodden the century as an assiduous observer, both witness and actor of its history, pursuing a journalistic career before devoting himself to writing novels and to directing documentaries, including the remarkable Venus d’ailleurs series, depicting the successive French, Indian, Chinese and African waves of immigration in Mauritius. His accomplices are Jacques Brel (“I was 14 when I first heard him sing ’Ne me quitte pas’, and my desire to write was born”), Gandhi, Garcia Marquez, Céline, and “all musicians”. composed Mauritius’s national anthem, in 1968,” explains the writer, born in 1952. Not even the ghost of Aunt Athalie, “an authoritative but generous old maid, who would cook for everyone,” is missing: Robert, Alain’s older brother, opened a table d’hôte on the estate in 2003 “to perpetuate her memory and delicious recipes”. At the bottom of the garden, under an awning, there is a collection of vintage cars, including the white Wolseley owned by Alain’s father,
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