Prospero's Daughter (21 page)

FOURTEEN

"TELL ME HOW we came to be here?” Virginia asked me not long after her father put an end to her education. “Tell me about our history.”

Her skin was pale, her hair blond, her eyes blue, but she said our. Not
your. Our
history, she said.

“My father’s people came in chains,” I said.

“Chains?” Her eyes widened.

“Before them, before a single African touched these shores, there were Amerindians. Almost every last one of them wiped out by small-pox.”

“Infected by something on the island?” she asked.

“Not something. Someone. The Europeans brought disease with them that killed nearly all the Amerindians.”

“And your father’s people?”

“Brought from Africa, herded on ships like cattle. They were slaves on the plantations.”

Her father had told her none of this, and he had discussed none of this with me. All I had were my father’s poems. They recounted a merciless sea, a crossing in a ship’s coffin, men and women in chains, heads stacked against legs for efficiency. An arrival on a land where European women clutched Bibles and sang holy verses to justify what their men had done.

“When did this happen?”

“Not that long ago,” I said.

And did the people in England know what was happening here?

She was reading Jane Austen at that time and had finished both
Sense and Sensibility
and
Pride and Prejudice.
I gave her
Mansfield Park.
Two weeks later, halfway through the novel, she approached me again. Why, she wanted to know, was there “such a dead silence” (she quoted the line from the novel precisely) from everybody who was present when Fanny Price asked Sir Thomas Bertram, who had just returned from Antigua, about the slave trade in the West Indies?

I said they were embarrassed, I said they must have all felt some twinge of conscience, some sense of their hypocrisy, especially Sir Thomas, who had put on such a show about the impropriety of his unmarried daughters acting in a play about romantic love with unmarried men when he, on the other hand, had committed the worst sin that any human could commit. He had traded human flesh, he had treated his fellow humans as chattel, worse than that, he had done so without pity or remorse, for the sole purpose of extending his property, adding to his creature comforts, for a household of a wife, two sons, and two daughters that was more than adequate for ten times, no, twenty times, as many. He was a criminal, I said.

She seemed shocked by the strong word I had used. “A criminal?” Her head shot forward.

“Men like him were all criminals,” I said. “They committed crimes against humanity.” I searched her face for signs that I had offended her. Her father was English, her mother, too, all her grandparents for generations back. “But, of course,” I said, “you’d first have to believe that the people they tortured were humans.”

If I had shocked her, she recovered quickly. “They
were
humans,” she said.

How could I not love her?

I told her that to those people, Africans were less than humans. If they took them away from their homes and families, if they used whips and chains to force them to work, they had done so not to men and women, but to a species they considered less than men and women.

She looked so sad I began to regret that I had told her this. “Not all English people thought so,” I said. “Many of them fought to free the slaves.”

“But what about people like Sir Thomas Bertram? How could they stand to know that people had to suffer and die for them to live so grand?”

They.
She didn’t conceive of herself as part of
they.
The very scene in the novel that had arrested me arrested her. She could not read of Fanny Price’s query dispassionately. Antigua was in the West Indies and so was Chacachacare. She was not born here, but she had known only here. The landscape, the sun, the sea had shaped her.

I had asked Gardner this question: If a seed came from England but was planted here, would the flower belong here or there? Would the flower be ours or theirs?

He did not hesitate. He pointed to a rose he had bred. It was his labor that had made it so beautiful. It was the sun
here
and the soil
here
he had prepared with a special fertilizer from
here
that had made it so. “Of course, it is my rose,” he said. “They couldn’t grow a rose like that in England.”

I knew what he said was true. And there could not be a girl like her in England.

FIFTEEN

AS THE YEARS WENT BY, Gardner became ever more careful about keeping his secrets from me. He did not want me to know the formula for the solution he concocted to clone his orchids and to grow grass that seldom needed watering. I was at his side to help him when he was grafting bougainvillea to sprout petals with polka dots and anthuriums to bloom like calla lilies, but he sent me to the house when he mixed the fertilizer. I brought him berries from Trinidad but he made sure I was never around when he fermented them to make the blue liquid he drank every day.

I was not bothered by these little tricks he apparently believed had fooled me. I was relieved, especially thankful on those predawn mornings when I stumbled groggily to the backyard, fighting sleep, and he sent me away. “Go back to bed,” he would snarl. “A brain like yours needs its rest, Carlos.”

His insult had no effect on me. Gardening was not what interested me. Literature and music interested me.

I didn’t think it crossed his mind that when he was not in the house, Virginia would welcome my company. For all his sometimes kindly treatment of me—when we listened to music together, when we talked about Shakespeare and Milton—he still thought of me as a sort of special species of Homo sapiens, not quite as human as he. In his version of Darwin, the ugly was always attracted to the beautiful, but never vice versa. And since in his eyes I was ugly and Virginia was beautiful, he believed she would recoil from me. But Virginia did not recoil from me. She liked me. She was polite, perfunctorily pleasant with me in his presence, but in his absence she was my friend.

It was because of her that I showed him my poetry. I had kept it a secret from him, at first doing so out of my longing for some tangible connection to my father, something I could claim was ours, mine and his alone. I wanted to believe my father had passed on his talent to me, given me his gift, and I guarded my poems jealously. One day, pride (I know now it was also love) led me to give Virginia three. They were poems about the beauty of the island, about my dreams of the sea and the land, the sky and the clouds, dreams so intense and real to me that when I woke I longed to sleep so I could dream again. Virginia praised me lavishly. She called me a magician, a juggler with words. Flattered, I forgot my mask and gave the poems to Gardner. “Junk,” he said and tore them up.

Later at night I searched for the pieces in the garbage can where he had thrown them. Not a single scrap of paper did I find. Two days later, I came upon the torn edges of one of my poems under a clay pot where he had recently transplanted one of the orchids he had stripped off the tree in the cove.

woke up this morning,
had to search for a reason to live,
look—a bird

I stuffed my poem in my pocket.

I took more risks for Virginia in my desire to see her happy. Because Gardner had declared all tropical fruits diseased, she had never tasted a mango. On a trip to Trinidad, I smuggled one for her in my bag. When I got off the boat I was careful to hide it under the doctor’s house. The next day I retrieved it from behind a concrete pillar. The delight on Virginia’s face when her teeth sank into the pulp was more than reward for me. Mango juice spurted out of her mouth and ran down her fingers and wrist to the top of her blouse. She begged me to bring her more.

It was the telltale sign of yellow mango juice on her blouse that betrayed our secret to Ariana. From then on, I had to bring mangoes for Ariana, too, for though she delighted in the name I had given her for Gardner, I could not always be certain of her constancy. There were times, after her hour with Gardner, when a savage anger seemed to burn in her. Instead of moping around listlessly, as she sometimes did when Gardner left for his garden, she would stomp through the house, shouting, “No talking today. Work.” She would demand that Virginia follow her into the kitchen and threaten to tell on me if I hesitated to return to my room. These bouts of anger were short-lived, however. In a day or two they passed and Virginia and I were able to resume the pattern of our afternoons, though always we remained uncertain of her moods.

The mangoes did not completely eradicate Ariana’s resentment but they did much to compensate for her humiliation when Gardner made her cook and nursemaid to Virginia. On her good days she would concede that it was not Virginia’s fault but Prospero’s, that “I am she servant.” On her bad days she complained about having to look after Virginia “as if she a baby.” Then she would turn on me. “And watch you, too.” Gardner wanted to be doubly sure of me.

Soon I was bringing back from Trinidad not only mangoes, but oranges and portugals, chennettes and guavas, governor plums and green plums, pomme cythere and pommerac, dongs and tamarind, siki yea figs and bananas. I always hid my bag of treasure under the doctor’s house and picked it up the next day when Gardner was in his greenhouse. We took no chances. We buried the skins and seeds in a hole I had dug for that purpose beyond the front yard.

The fruit bought Ariana’s silence when Gardner questioned her about Virginia’s day, but she let me know that I was indebted to her. “If it ent for me, you’d be in a lot of trouble. He saving her for a white man. You better don’t get it in your head to like her.”

Foolishly, I still did not think I was in danger of liking Virginia in the way Ariana meant.

Then, one day, shortly before Virginia’s fifteenth birthday, everything changed. I should have been forewarned. I had had a sign. But I was not superstitious. Lucinda had told me stories about the soucouyant, the douen, la diablesse, and though I was a child then and readily impressionable, I never believed what she told me. I knew she wanted to scare me, to keep me within her boundaries. I didn’t believe there was a soucouyant under the tree outside our yard, an old woman who shed her skin at night and turned into a ball of fire. And Lucinda couldn’t make me go to bed when I was not sleepy by frightening me with her tales of la diablesse, a pretty woman with a cloven foot, and douens, spirits of dead children who had not been baptized, all of them waiting in the dark to lure the innocent to their doom. I already knew about fairy tales from my mother, and I no more believed in the stories Lucinda told me than in the ones my mother used to read to me about a giant that lived on the top of a beanstalk or about pigs that talked.

That day I missed the three o’clock boat that was to bring me back to Chacachacare after I finished my errands in Trinidad. Gardner had given me a list for the pharmacist, but when I handed the list to the pharmacist, he gave it back to me. He couldn’t help Gardner this time, he said. The drugs Gardner wanted were not the regular kind. No, he said, slapping away the paper I was holding out to him, the drugs on the list were
big-time
drugs, not the kind that a small-fry like him could just mix up in a back room and hand out to anybody. He would need a prescription.

I knew Gardner would be angry if I came back empty-handed, so I reminded him that Gardner was a doctor. If he could prescribe for other people, he could certainly prescribe for himself. The pharmacist mumbled something about dangerous drugs and poison. Afraid he wouldn’t change his mind, I made it clear to him that if Gardner did not get what he had sent me for he wouldn’t buy from him again. Do you want to risk losing his business? I asked him. It never occurred to me that the deep lines that deepened on his forehead when he took the list back from me were not caused by anxiety, but by fear for my personal safety.

The pharmacist had told me to come back later. It turned out he meant much later than when I arrived, and it was two-thirty before he was ready for me, too late for me to catch the three o’clock boat. At four o’clock I found a boat that was taking passengers to their vacation homes on Monos and Huevos, the tiny islands not far from Chacachacare, but when the passengers discovered I lived on Chacachacare, they spurned me. They did not want me on the boat, they said. Lepers live on Chacachacare. It took the boatman some time to convince them they had no cause for worry. I lived on the other side of the horseshoe, he told them, far from the colony.

Ten minutes out on the sea, the passenger who had most protested my presence, a stout, caramel-colored woman, who, even after the other passengers agreed reluctantly to let me on the boat, still objected, claiming that the boat was too small to hold us all (it was a pirogue), began shouting hysterically and pointing to the sky. Above us, banners of red in undulating waves were cutting across the blueness of the sky. The strange sight of ibis coming home early to the mangrove. A sunset, though the sun was still golden in the sky.

Something had frightened them in Venezuela, the boatman said. They never leave till almost night.

“Is a sign, is a sign,” the woman cried. “We going to drown today. I tell the boatman not to take the boy.”

Nobody drowned. The boatman docked safely at Monos and Huevos, and brought me afterward to Chacachacare. But when I got there, I had cause to wonder if I had not been given a sign, if the ibis, frightened into returning home early to the mangrove in Trinidad, were not warning indeed of trouble to come.

As soon as I opened the back door, I heard Virginia. She was trying to dislodge something that was clogging her throat. Her head was bent low over the kitchen sink and I could see only shoulders shuddering each time the muscles in her throat constricted. She spun around when I called out to her. Her eyes were red, the skin around her mouth a deep, dark purple, and long trails of spittle dribbled from her mouth. I dropped my bags and rushed to her, but she ran out of the kitchen, and before I could reach her, she locked her bedroom door.

Ariana slunk past me. “Help her,” I begged. “Something’s happened to her.”

“Leave her,” she said. Her voice was strangely calm.

“She’s sick,” I said. I grabbed Ariana’s arm.

“Leave her.” She disentangled herself from my grasp.

“She was throwing up. I saw her.”

“She do like that all the time now,” she said.

“Like what?”

“You don’t see. I see,” she said.

“Is she sick?”

“Ask her.”

“Ask her what?”

“You and she talking all the time. Ask her what in her throat.”

But Virginia did not answer her door when I knocked, and Gardner asked no questions when Ariana told him that his daughter was not well.

The next morning, by chance, I came upon Virginia in the corridor. I had been working with Gardner in the backyard and he had sent me to the house to fetch him a glass of water. She was standing in front of the mirror. Her mouth was open and she was twisting her head from side to side, peering into the back of her throat. She did not see me, though I was at the end of the corridor, not far from where she was. I came closer to her and called her name. She flinched and closed her mouth.

“I thought you were outside,” she said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. “With my father.”

“Are you sick? Is something the matter?”

“No. No,” she said. A lock of her hair had fallen across her face. She tucked it behind her ear. Twelve years ago, her hair was blond; now it had turned honey brown. She wore it pushed back from her forehead, in a loose plait down her back, inches above her waist, but a curl or two always managed to slip out.

“Is something wrong with your throat?” I asked her.

“No. I’m fine. I’m okay.”

“I heard you,” I said.

“A silly infection.” She rubbed the side of her neck. “I get it sometimes. My tonsils,” she said.

I wanted to believe her because she seemed to want me to believe her. “Put two heaping spoonfuls of salt in warm water and gargle.” I gave her Lucinda’s remedy.

“Salt?” she repeated the word as if it were all I had said.

“I’ll get it for you.” I moved toward the kitchen.

“No.” She held up her hands. “You have to go back. Father,” she warned.

She seemed different. Her skin, normally a golden brown, was dull, lifeless. Her face was pale, the sides of her mouth the color of chalk. She was wearing a flowered print dress, belted at the waist. It did nothing to brighten her complexion.

Gardner had told her that no one was more beautiful than her mother. He had put a photograph of her mother in her room, and when she showed it to me, she asked me, almost in despair, if I thought there was a chance that she would grow to resemble her mother. She had her mother’s heart-shaped face, her aquiline nose, her soft chin, even the same crinkles, when she smiled, that formed around her mother’s eyes. But what I loved most were her lips, full, wide, generous. They were her mother’s lips, though in the photograph those lips were pressed together as if they concealed a secret. I told her I did not think she would grow to look like her mother. I told her she was lovelier than her mother. Now, color drained from her face, she looked exactly like the photograph on her dresser.

“Go,” she said again when I had not moved. “He’ll be waiting for you.”

“Does he know you’re sick?”

She reached for the box of salt in the cupboard. “I didn’t come out for dinner.”

It was a simple statement loaded with a truth I could not ignore. Gardner was told she was sick but he had made no mention of her, not to Ariana when she served his dinner, not to me when he called me later to the drawing room. The record he had ordered had arrived from Trinidad. A Mozart concerto. We listened to it all evening.

“Why didn’t you open your door when I knocked?” I asked her.

“He won’t like it if you don’t go back soon,” she said.

“Shall I tell him?”

She turned on the tap and filled a glass with water.

“I’m going to tell him,” I said.

She faced me. Gardner had given her earrings. They were an early present for her fifteenth birthday, gold pendants with tiny blue stones at the bottom. They matched her eyes. She was wearing them, but they did not match her eyes now. The stones were clear, blue as a sunlit sea, but her eyes were dark, troubled. A silvered sea on the eve of a storm.