Prospero's Daughter (11 page)

Ariana’s lies.
It disturbed Mumsford that he would think now of her lies.

“Carlos,” the monk began and then hesitated. “Is that how you want to be called, my son?”

Carlos pulled in his leg, but did not speak.

Perhaps it was mere coincidence, Mumsford thought. And because he preferred to think that way, because he could not bear to entertain for a second that there might be some truth in what Ariana had written, he suppressed the temptation to doubt himself. Carlos’s face registered nothing, no emotion, no concern, no anxiety.

“He does not speak much,” he said to the monk.

“And it’s clear why not.” The monk walked over to Carlos and stood in front of him. “I’ll take you to our clinic, son. Brother Henry will give you something for those sores. Then you can have something to eat. After that, I’ll show you to your bedroom.” His eyes lingered on the dried blisters that were clustered on Carlos’s face. “Are they everywhere?”

The question was for Carlos, but Mumsford answered. “All over his body. I saw them.”

“What kind of beast . . . ?” The monk shook his head and the loose flesh on his cheeks wiggled back and forth. “I thought he was a doctor,” he said to Mumsford.

“His interest seems to be botany,” Mumsford said.

“Botany?”

“He is a gardener.” Both men’s heads swung back to Carlos. They were the first words he had uttered since his arrival. Others followed. “He specializes in grafting. He likes splitting the seeds of plants and implanting the seeds of other plants inside them. He likes binding cuttings of live plants from different genera. His interest is cross-pollination. His grass does not need watering.”

Mumsford did not like Dr. Gardner. He had insulted him more than once that morning. But they were countrymen, Englishmen together in an English colony. He glared at Carlos. “He keeps a reservoir,” he said, and paused as if waiting for Carlos to contradict him. When he didn’t, he repeated for the monk what Gardner had told him. “It’s the miracles of modern science, Brother St. Clair. Dr. Gardner is also a scientist.”

“That was why I left the garden.” Carlos spoke again.

“
The
garden?” The indefinite article arrested the monk.

“
The
garden,” Carlos repeated.

“Are you speaking of Eden, my son? We all left the garden.”

“He means Dr. Gardner’s garden,” Mumsford said. “You should see it. Orchids . . .”

“Adam is my hero,” Carlos said.

The monk blushed. “He was a sinner, my son.”

“Eden is a European myth meant to keep servants and slaves in their place,” Carlos said.

Mumsford cleared his throat.

“Had Adam remained in the garden, he would not have been his own man,” Carlos said.

“That is heresy, my son.”

Mumsford came between them. “You are here on the kindness of the monks,” he said to Carlos. “Remember that.”

“That is not the point of the story,” the monk was insisting.

“Really, Brother St. Clair,” Mumsford interrupted him. “The boy doesn’t know what he is saying.”

“You are wrong about Adam,” the monk said.

Carlos pressed his lips together.

“Wrong,” the monk repeated.

Carlos looked down at his feet and did not respond. Mumsford was relieved. He did not want trouble. He had delivered the boy and now he wished to go home. In the morning he would call the commissioner. In the morning he would give him the details in an official report.

“I’m afraid I must be on my way, Brother St. Clair,” he said. The monk mumbled something that he did not hear, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t want to be drawn into a foolish argument with the boy. “Call me if you have any problems.” Mumsford was already walking toward the front door. “But I don’t expect you will have any trouble from him.” He paused. “Right, young man?” His hand was on the doorknob.

Carlos continued to look down at his feet.

“Right?” Mumsford asked again.

The monk shook out his skirt. It billowed out and fell in folds around his bare ankles. “He’ll be okay,” he said. “I will take care of him.”

Mumsford was not satisfied. He expected some gesture of gratitude from the boy, some appreciation for having spared him the horrors of Her Majesty’s Royal Jail. “You should thank Brother St. Clair,” he said to him.

But Carlos remained still with his lips firmly closed.

As soon as he arrived home, Mumsford called the commissioner. He told him he had given the boy to Brother St. Clair. He said Dr. Gardner had him locked up in some kind of pen in his backyard; he said the boy went quietly with him; he had given him no trouble.

“He’s an odd one,” the commissioner said.

And from his tone Mumsford was puzzled, unsure of which one he meant: the boy or Dr. Gardner, so he asked.

“Dr. Gardner, of course,” the commissioner said. “Keeps to himself. I’ve invited him here once or twice but he never shows up.”

An odd one, indeed. Mumsford decided that tomorrow would be soon enough for the commissioner to know exactly how odd, to tell him about the odd flowers and the odd green lawn. Tomorrow he would tell him, too, exactly what Dr. Gardner had done to the boy in his backyard. He wanted to be able to see the expression on the commissioner’s face when he told him. Would he, as Brother St. Clair had done, feel sorry for the boy, say that Dr. Gardner was heartless? He, too, had thought Dr. Gardner had not had justification enough. But he had been loyal, he had kept his thoughts to himself. Would the French Creole be as discreet, be as loyal? Tomorrow he would record the details in the report; tomorrow he would submit it and see. For now he wanted his supper, a glass of red wine, light banter with his mother about her day at the Country Club, nothing to remind him of the boy.

Yet that evening as his mother blithely carried on, buttering her baked potato and cutting into the slices of roast lamb on her plate (he was right; she was to blame for the crumbs near his desk, and lamb and baked potatoes were her peace offering), he could not put Carlos’s words out of his mind.
Eden, a European myth meant to keep servants and
slaves in their place.

In England,
he
had been kept in his place. He had come here to escape that place. The recruiting officer had dangled that promise like a gilded carrot and he had grabbed on to it. Here, he had servants. There, he was a bobby on foot patrol. And after he saw those glossy ads—smiling faces, windblown hair, children frolicking in a sea bluer than the sky—he asked no questions.

“Went to Cambridge.”

Mumsford jerked his head upward, startled. An echo from his mind. He had not been paying attention to the monotonous drivel coming from his mother’s direction, but when he looked up, he saw that her lips were moving.
Went to Cambridge.
The words had blasted out at him just as he was thinking of those lucky rich blokes who didn’t have to be bobbies, who went to the right schools—Cambridge.

“Imagine, a colored man!”

Mumsford slumped down in his chair. She was at it again, her favorite subject these days.

“But I suppose Mary Hinsdale made a good bargain. After all, he’s the chief medical officer. Do you know anybody who went to Cambridge, John?” She arched her eyebrows as if her question were genuine. And yet she knew better. And yet she knew no one in his social class had managed to rise so far.

“The world is changing, John.” She sighed. “It’s the colored man’s turn.”

The colored man’s turn.
Yes, the boy got a chance. Dr. Gardner had taught him, been kind to him. Wasn’t that what he said? Still, Mumsford could not get his brain to obey him, to blanket the memory of the boy’s eyes, the intensity of the hatred naked there, the glitter that bounced off his eyelids when he spat on Dr. Gardner’s face.

A spasm of pain rippled through his stomach and he pushed his plate away, his appetite, so huge moments ago, suddenly vanished. He had been whipped by his schoolmasters in England. All the boys in his grammar school had been. “Lucky for you the stocks are outlawed,” one particularly brutal beater had said to him.

Later that night as he settled in bed, the two memories conflated: the whippings he had suffered at the hands of his schoolmasters; Dr. Gardner jeering. He had insulted him, laughed at him when he used the word
anthropologically.
But it was a new word for him and it had taken him no little courage to speak it.

Little by little, sinking into the mattress that was too soft for his aching back stiff with tension, Mumsford found himself moving dangerously close to empathizing with Carlos. And then, just as he was on the verge of capitulating, a mosquito saved him.

He had hung the netting from the hook on the ceiling and had tucked the ends tightly under the mattress. Still a mosquito had managed to sneak its way inside. It buzzed past his right ear and he flapped his hand forward to strike it down, but it rose, circled his head, and returned, this time to his left ear. He swiped his hand across his face, punching the pillow on either side. The mosquito buzzed past his head again and lit on his neck, sinking its probes deep into his flesh. He bounded up on both feet on his bed, flailing his hands in the air. His fingers got caught on the holes of the netting above him and the netting collapsed and fell over him, trapping him like an animal in the wild.

When he disentangled himself, he felt the sting of the mosquito bite and he was bitter again, cursing the bad luck that had brought him here, to the tropics; pitying Dr. Gardner for his leathered skin, his rusty, dull hair; swearing to himself, as he had sworn in Dr. Gardner’s drawing room, that not many more months would find him still here. He had improved his status, but he would take his chances in England. Whatever the cause, Dr. Gardner must have had good reason for imprisoning the boy.

Ariana was late, but as far as Mumsford was concerned that was to be expected. The natives, Mumsford believed, lacked the English understanding of the importance of punctuality, the English sense of order. They arrived when it suited them, always unapologetic, never concerned with any inconvenience they could have caused. Everything for them was a joke. “You too uptight,” they were likely to say if you were foolish enough to complain, or if you had not lived long enough in the tropics to know that whatever time you had set, you had in fact made a tacit agreement to add an hour or two to it.
Relax, man. Don’t give
yourself a heart attack. The world not going nowhere.

Their carefree attitude irritated Mumsford, mostly because it had the effect of turning the tables on the one who complained. Suddenly, you were the stupid one; you were the one willing to risk a heart attack for the sake of mere minutes. If you made the case that they were not mere minutes but an entire hour, if not more, you would be accused of not being manly, of suffering from nerves like a woman, of being neurotic.
Take it easy, man. Is only sixty minutes.

He had learned. He came to his office prepared, anticipating that Ariana would be late, as they all were late. He brought the notes he had taken in Chacachacare and the ones he had jotted down on his way home from the monastery. Now he read them over carefully, for he wanted to be accurate, he wanted to be able to substantiate all he was going to write. He stuck paper in the typewriter and began. First, he recorded his notes on what Gardner had said about Carlos and his mother. He left out the part where Gardner had called Carlos freckled. He did not want to take the chance that in recalling what Gardner had said, he would suggest what he, Mumsford, had intimated. But in his bones he felt sure Gardner had meant something more, something accusatory when he spat out
Freckled.
Mumsford decided instead to type what Gardner had asserted: Carlos’s mother was a white woman, perhaps English. His father was colored, a black man.

Let the commissioner make of it what he would, Mumsford thought. He was not going to insinuate his opinions on interbreeding in his report. Yet as he described the flowers and the grass Gardner had grown, as he typed the word
cross-pollination
and then the word
crossbreeding,
he couldn’t help wondering if he weren’t right when he suggested to Dr. Gardner that perhaps he had encouraged Carlos in thinking of the possibility, in planting in his head the idea that interbreeding of the races was acceptable, preferable even.

Peopling.
It was the word Dr. Gardner said Carlos had used. Mumsford had not heard it before. A strange word, but, he reasoned, Carlos would not have dared to say it outright. He would not have dared to say to Dr. Gardner’s face, “I want to fuck your daughter.” He would not have been so reckless, for that would have been justification enough to jail him, for Gardner to do his worst, to lock him up, as he had done, in that stinking pen in his backyard.

All the while Mumsford was finishing the report, typing what he had seen of the condition of Carlos’s skin, the stink that had assaulted his nostrils as he approached the fenced-off area, he couldn’t let go of the interpretation he had given to peopling.
I want to fuck your daughter.
Like the canopy of vines that blanketed the tops of trees in the rainy season, shutting out light, siphoning off oxygen, the words weighed down on him, clouding his brain, choking off other possibilities.

For a brief moment at supper with his mother, when his mind had drifted, he had understood. For a second he had sympathized. He, too, like the boy, had been expected to stay in his place. But now
I want to
fuck your daughter
left no space for alternatives, and he did something that he prided himself in avoiding during an investigation. He inserted his opinion in the report. When he typed the conversation at the monastery, what Carlos had said to the monk, he wrote: “The boy is obviously misguided. He seems intelligent, but not educated enough to understand that Adam had disobeyed God and deserved his punishment.”

Ariana arrived at noon, two hours after she had said she would. She came toward him mumbling a convolution of half sentences strung together in no order that Mumsford could make sense of, except that she seemed to blame Dr. Gardner. It was he who had made her late. “He need me,” she said.