Prospero's Daughter (25 page)

“If only your mother was here . . .” Father began with the usual refrain. He loved me, he said. All he did was in care of me, his dear one, his daughter. He had done his best; he had tried to be a good father, a kind and loving father.

How else could I respond but to say I loved him, too, to say he was a kind and loving father?

Ah, he said, he would have done more if he were truly a kind and loving father. He would not have abandoned me.

“Abandoned me?” He had brought me with him from England. He had not abandoned me.

“I should not have left you to figure out by yourself the things a woman must know,” he said. He looked directly into my eyes. “You have a jewel.”

It was wishful thinking, absurd that I should have allowed myself to believe he was speaking of my mother’s diamond engagement ring. He had given it to me years ago, when I was still a child. He had warned me to keep it under lock and key. It was one of a kind, he had said. But so profound was my embarrassment at that moment that I reached for the slimmest straw.

“I still have it, Father,” I said. “I have not lost it.”

He grimaced. “And you will be worth nothing if you do,” he said.

I flinched and he asked: “Do I surprise you? Ah, but you know nothing about the world.” He rocked back in his chair. “I can tell you much about the world. The world is evil,” he said.

“No one here would steal Mother’s ring,” I said, still trying to hold on to my childhood.

“Foolish child.” His eyes were full of scorn for me.

“But I have it, Father. I can show it to you. I can, Father.”

Did I mirror a desire he had managed to suppress?
I can show it to
you.
At night, in bed, was this his dream?

He brought his chair to a standstill. “I’m not speaking of your mother’s ring.” His voice was hoarse. “Your biggest jewel.
That
is what I mean. Your virgin knot.” He leaned forward toward me.

Instinctively I drew my legs together and locked them at my knees.

“The jewel in your dower. Your prize,” he said.

I prayed the floor would open up and swallow me. I twisted my body in the chair, trying to escape the oily sheen glittering off his eyes.

“You’re not like them.
Animals,
that’s what they are. They lack self-control. Reason.” He drummed his index finger into his forehead. “They give in to every impulse, every desire. Break your virgin knot and you will be just like them. No more than an animal that has no reason, that has no will, that does what it wants to do, when it wants to do it.
We
control our bodies.
We
do not let our bodies control us.
We
control our desires. Our desires do not control us. Do you understand me?”

I clenched my hands hard into each other.

“You will be no different from Ariana if you lose your jewel.” The vein in the middle of his forehead was thick and dark. “Guard it or you will have no value.”

How could I have guessed then that I would have to guard it from him?

For two days I wore the corset he had given me, and then on the third day a rash broke out across my waist and around the top of my thighs where the elastic, soaked with perspiration, clung to my skin. By the end of the week, a rosary of tiny bumps had spread down my thighs and was working its way toward my knees. He relented finally. I no longer had to wear a corset, but my dresses had to be made in a style that had skirts wide enough to conceal the movement of my bottom and roomy enough for my breasts.

“You’re like your mother,” he said, rubbing on my thighs and legs a salve he had mixed. “Her skin was sensitive. Your father’s skin was tough.”

It was possible he was unaware he had said,
your father,
not
my father;
that he had used the past tense,
was,
not
is.
But I needed to be reassured; I needed to be reminded he was my father, my protector. My nerves were strained, my mind in a turmoil with guilt for feelings I could not articulate. What had he done that a parent would not have done? Who else could have prepared me to be a woman? My mother was dead. I should have been grateful he was willing to be both mother and father to me, and yet I was overcome with shame when he spoke to me about these intimate things concerning my body, shame that almost paralyzed me now when he touched my thighs.

“Aren’t you my father?” I asked him.

“Your mother was a virtuous woman,” he said, “and she told me you were my daughter.”

His answer intensified my confusion. I believed that he believed he was my father, but the words he seemed to have chosen deliberately deepened my discomfort, my yet-unarticulated suspicions. He praised my mother, but he also cast a shadow over her.

TWENTY

BUT I WAS ALSO HAPPY on Chacachacare. I had Carlos for a companion. From the day he saved the bird Father had almost killed, I felt bound to him by an invisible string Father could not break. In Father’s presence we pretended we meant nothing to each other, but we had our secret codes: a wink, a smile, a nod.

Carlos did not eat at the table with Father and me, but from where he was positioned in the kitchen I could see him, and we devised ways of sending signals to each other. When Father bent over his plate, I would look up and wave to Carlos. Sometimes I would accidentally drop my napkin on the floor. From under the table, I would flutter my fingers, reminding Carlos of the time we fed a bird together. I did that twice at dinner one night and Father spoke sharply to me. “I’ll have to pin that napkin to your bodice if you can’t keep it on your lap,” he said. But he must have noticed, too, that from where I sat I could look straight across to Carlos.

I do not think Father allowed himself to imagine that I could have feelings for Carlos, yet something instinctual in him that he could not or would not articulate made him decide that night to block my view. The next day he moved the table and made me sit with my back to the kitchen. Not long afterward I was a participant in a lecture he staged with a stack of sticks to warn Carlos and Ariana of the consequences of disobeying him. I stiffened against Father when he pulled me close to his chest and pointed out my place on the pyramid he had made with the sticks. My place, he said, was just below his place and above the place where he had put Carlos and Ariana.

“That’s why they eat in the kitchen,” Father explained to me after he had dismissed Ariana and Carlos.

“But we found them here,” I protested.

“Ah,” he sighed, “if not for us, where would they be?” He reminded me how much they needed his help. “A tree had crashed into the side of the house, remember? What if I had not moved it? What if I had not fixed the wall? The next storm would have wiped them out. That woman could not take care of them. She was too sick. They would have nothing if I had not helped them.”

He claimed Lucinda sold him the house in gratitude for all he did for her. “I let him stay free of charge,” he said. “I don’t ask him to pay me.”

But Carlos insisted the house was his. “It was my mother’s,” he said to me, “and so it’s mine.” Yet he never confronted Father, though often I heard Father remind him that he had bought the house from Lucinda, that Carlos was lucky he had permitted him to live with us. What was I to conclude except that Carlos said those things to me because he
wished
the house were his; he
wished
his mother had not let Lucinda have it?

Carlos kept his tongue in his mouth, too, when Father repeated the story he had told us about the fall of Lucifer. I knew Carlos seethed with anger. I saw his face darken, his nostrils flare, but he never challenged Father.

“Why?” I asked Father again when I was much older. “Why do we belong at the top of the pyramid?”

“You do not know who you are,” Father said. “Do you think this primitive place was always your home?”

I knew I was born in England. How many times had Father told me that I was an heir to an empire? How many times had he told me about kings and queens and the conquests that vaulted their little island to an empire? But these stories never took root in my imagination. No matter how often he tried to convince me I belonged to the world he described of castles and manor houses, of lords and ladies—
civilized
gentry
—to a world of battleships and bombers that had conquered continents, I felt removed from it, distant, a stranger, an alien to the people and places he said were mine.

The winter wonderland he spoke about seemed to me a figment of his imagination, snow and sleet as unreal to me as the turrets and towers he described. The host of golden daffodils, sheep grazing on rolling green meadows, fantasies. But I had seen the ibis return home before twilight; I had seen the sky turn red with their scarlet feathers when they flew past our island from their feeding grounds in Venezuela to roost in the mangrove in Trinidad. I had seen the sky so blue I imagined God. I had seen the sun set it on fire and spread its dying embers in a carnival of colors across the horizon. I had smelled the air after a rainfall, sodden with salt from the sea. I had heard thunder roar when lightning sliced the clouds in two. I had mistaken the songs of birds for the voices of humans singing. This was my world. These were the sounds and sweet smells I knew, I loved.

But this time when he related my history to me again, Father wanted to be specific.

“I was famous in England,” he said. “An important man.” He waved his hand over his face to brush away my astonishment. “Fame brings envy,” he said.

Was he envied? I asked him.

“By everybody,” he said. “Especially by my brother.”

The story he told me was different from the one he told Carlos, though calculated also to gain my gratitude. My father wanted people to be beholden to him. He thrived on their gratitude. He did not give me the lie about doing his bit for the Empire. He wanted me to know he had sacrificed his life for me.

“I was a better doctor than my brother,” he said. “He was jealous of me, of the praise I got constantly. When your mother died, he figured out a way to hurt me. He was married and had no children. He took me to court on a trumped-up story that I was too busy and had no time to raise you. You were a baby, just three. He said you needed a mother, and his wife would be the perfect mother for you. I had enemies. I knew there was a chance he could win the case, so I ran. Nobody would look for me in a leper colony.”

I did not dare ask: What caused your brother to think you had no time for me, Father? Why did you have enemies?

“You are a third of my life,” he said. “That for which I live. You preserved me.”

I clung to his flamboyant declaration of paternal love, hoping to chase away the dark shadows drifting between us. Would a father who so loved his daughter, who lived for her, given up friends, comfort, England, all for her, do anything to harm her?

“I am fair to Carlos,” he said. “I treat him better than befits his station. His mother was a party girl, his father a black nobody. You come from better stock.” My station, his station, Father said, was higher than Carlos’s station.

We were on an isolated island. A cell, Father sometimes called it. Across from us, a leper colony, hidden only by the bend in the horseshoe darkened by low hills dense with trees. On an island like ours, what did station matter?

“Ah,” Father said. “Everything.”

Everything
was the natural order of the universe.

I heard Ariana use Father’s very words to the fisherman who brought our fish on Mondays. I used to go with her in late afternoon to meet him at the edge of the bay. He was infatuated with her but she would have nothing to do with him. He smelled of fish guts, she said, and his clothes were filthy.

I thought he was handsome. His pants were torn, his sleeveless vest, once white, was stained with dried blood. Fish scales glinted across his bare arms, some tangled in his matted hair, but his face glowed with a sheen that made me think of a newly minted penny: clean, washed, unused, bronzed. When he spoke, it was easy to ignore his smell and his tattered clothes, to be drawn to him by his wide smile and bright, twinkling eyes.

“Ah always save the best fish for you,” he said, winking at Ariana.

She took the fish from him without a word. “He too boldface,” she told me later. “He forget his place.”

Did Ariana learn about place from my father, or did the concept of her place and the fisherman’s place in relation to her place come naturally to her? Did she think she had a right to a better place on the social ladder because she wore clean clothes and smelled of soap?

Carlos would quote Milton to me:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in
Heaven.
Yet he never contested Father’s perverted notions about the natural order of the universe that placed him below Father and me. There were days I waited anxiously for him to return from his errands for Father in Trinidad, all the time thinking that this would be the day, this would be the day he would not come back. But he never stayed. He always came back.

Father said he could go to school in Trinidad. Why didn’t he go?

“I would never learn as much as I am learning from him,” he said. “Your father gives me his books. I listen to his music.”

Was he really so grateful to Father? I heard the bitterness in his voice, I saw his jaw clench and his eyes turn cold in my father’s presence, but I pretended it was my imagination that made me hear and see such things, an illusion created out of my anxiety. I was selfish. I did not want to be left alone with Father on the island.

I could have had another friend. There was a girl who had tried to befriend me. I was with Ariana when I first saw her. Ariana was quarreling with the fisherman about the size of the fish he had brought for her. My father wanted baked stuffed fish for supper and had given her his orders.

“I tell you it have to be this long,” Ariana was saying to the fisherman. She stretched out her left arm and with her right hand measured its length, from her elbow to the tips of her fingers. The fisherman, giddy with his attraction for her, reached out to touch her.

“Ah,” he cooed, “yuh arm sweeter than sugar.”

Ariana pounced on him. He was too fast, she said, an expression alluding not to his physical dexterity but to the speed with which he had assumed familiarity with her. He had forgotten his place. He had crossed the line. “Monkey should know which tree to climb,” she said. She steupsed and flounced her body away from him.

Embarrassed for the fisherman, I looked in the other direction, away from the sea, toward the trees that grew up the incline on the right side of the doctor’s house, opposite to the path that led to our house. Something caught my eye, a branch swaying back and forth though there was no breeze. I squinted in the fiery light of the descending sun and peered into the distance. I saw arms first, then legs. That was all I saw before Ariana grabbed my hand and pulled me away.

I did not tell Ariana or Carlos what I had seen. I was sure the arms and legs belonged to a girl, and if I was right, she had broken the rules. She had gone beyond the boundary of the leper colony. If she was caught, she would be punished.

For two weeks, I searched for the girl among the trees, but there was no sign of her, not the slightest movement in the branches to give me hope. Then one day I looked down instead of up, and there I saw, propped against one of the tree trunks, a tiny bouquet of pink and yellow wildflowers tied with brown string. While Ariana bargained with the fisherman, I edged toward the trees and picked it up.

The next Monday, in the very same place, there was a single red hibiscus, tied once again with brown string. This time I saw her. She was crouched in a cup of the tree, her bare feet, bony like a bird’s, curled over the edge of a branch. She could have been my age but she was much thinner. The pink cotton petticoat she was wearing hung over her shoulders, a dress on a clothes hanger, the space seemingly empty beneath it except for knees, legs, and feet, spindly twigs, protruding. Her hair was cut short, just to her ears. It was thick and curly, the curls denser and tighter than Ariana’s. Her nose was small but her eyes were big, saucer-shaped. What I noticed most of all was her skin, and I let out my breath, relieved. It was flawless, a silky flow of brown chocolate, nothing to mar it, no telltale signs of the dreaded disease.

When our eyes met, she put her finger to her lips and pointed in Ariana’s direction. I picked up the hibiscus and stuffed it in my pocket.

The following Monday, while Ariana was distracted, I put my best yellow ribbon under the tree. The girl returned it to me the next Monday tied around five yellow buttercup flowers. I left her a pink ribbon the next time and she gave it back to me wrapped around a pink ixora. I left her a white one next, and I got it back with a bow on a white seashell. And so we did this exchange once a week, Ariana never finding out until, suddenly, the girl disappeared. Weeks went by and one by one the ribbons I left for her lost color, bleached by the blazing sun. Rain fell and the ribbons sank in the mud. In a month they were unrecognizable, tattered and torn.

Six months passed, and I had almost despaired of seeing the girl again, when one late afternoon something blue fluttered out in the breeze from behind the shadows of a pillar beneath the doctor’s house. The skirt of a dress! My heart pumping fast in my chest, I hurried toward the pillar. Ariana was too absorbed admonishing the fisherman about something to take notice of me. I was just a short distance away from the pillar when my friend came out of the shadows. I gasped, shocked when I saw her. Afraid Ariana had heard me, I turned around quickly, but the sound I had made as air rushed down my throat, almost choking me, had filtered through the fisherman’s teasing laughter and was lost in the soft lapping of the tiny waves upon the stony beach. In that split second when I turned back again, my friend was gone. She had evaporated into the air like the wet slick of rain on concrete when the sun came out. But her image remained, branded on my brain. Across her forehead and below her cheekbones I had seen blisters clustered together like tiny cherries, dark, firm, her flesh beginning to rot on a face alive, animated with excitement to see me until it met its reflection in the mirror of my eyes.

Never before had I been so close to someone with Hansen’s disease. I had had glimpses of some patients from the colony, but they were dark silhouettes against the afternoon sun, crammed next to each other in an open pirogue behind the government boat that towed them across the bay to Trinidad to visit relatives, their children, perhaps, who had been taken from them. These were the cured ones but the ones still treated as pariah, made to sit on benches in a rudderless boat. I should have felt pity for them, but the fear my father had instilled in me was too strong to leave room for compassion. I shut my eyes and wished them away. Now, seeing my friend’s face, her flesh rotting, I shuddered with revulsion.