Prospero's Daughter (30 page)

“Oh, the lepers wouldn’t be able to get off the island,” the inspector was saying, “but they could go to the lighthouse. The lighthouse keepers wouldn’t want that, of course. The disease, you know. They wouldn’t want to catch it.”

Two lighthouse keepers stayed on the island in one shift, the inspector explained, and were rotated every fortnight. They left the jeep near the bay for their replacements but they rigged it so that only a key like the one he had in his pocket could start the engine.

If we had forced him into acquiescing to our demands that I go with him to the lighthouse, the inspector seemed determined now to show us that he had not lost the English stiff upper lip. On the way to the bay, he trudged stoically forward, his shoulders erect, not giving the slightest indication of concern though at least twice I heard the scuttle of animal feet through the trees, and he could not have missed the huge iguana that peered at us from the side of the path.

The boatman was waiting for us. The inspector waved him away when he stretched out his hand to help him climb into the pirogue. “Do you know how to drive a jeep?” he asked him.

Not only a jeep, the boatman boasted, but a vehicle bigger than a jeep. A big truck. A big lorry. A bus. Anything with wheels . . .

“Can you take us to Dingsee Bay?” the inspector rudely interrupted and wiped away the grin plastered on the boatman’s face. But the boatman had his revenge.

“Dinghy Bay, you mean?” he asked. “I surprise you English people know that name. Ordinarily,” he said, speaking now directly to Carlos and me, “when the tide low, the only ways to get there is by dinghy. But the tide high now. We could pull up next to the jetty.”

“Dingsee or Dinghy,” the inspector said. “Can you take us there?” The jeep, he said, was hidden between the trees and tall bushes, not far from the shore.

“I take you there before you could say Jack Robinson,” the boatman said.

To get to Dinghy Bay, we had to cross Chacachacare Bay, in front of Sanders Bay and Coco Bay, the main settlements of the leper colony. I was glad the boatman avoided the coastline. We never came close enough for me to see the buildings distinctly. From the distance, out in the bay, they seemed unreal, drawings for a fictitious story: the weather-beaten leprosarium with its peaked roof, and behind it, lodged in a thicket of trees, wooden shacks climbing unsteadily up an incline, oddities on a desolate island.

I could have seen all this and felt nothing were it not for the group of sticklike figures standing close to the water, their arms thrust upward, waving.

“Not too many still here,” the boatman said, pointing to them.

Could she be one of them, my wordless friend whom I had spurned?

“Most of them cured and gone back to Trinidad,” the boatman said.

What had I been afraid of?

Father said: “Get too close and you get the disease. Do you want your face
to rot like theirs?”

I looked away, guilt choking me.

“Wave back,” the boatman said. “They like that. Wave!”

Carlos stood up and waved, but I was frozen in my seat.

Soon they were behind us and the boatman was pointing to another spot. “Up yonder. That’s where the nuns and them use to live. Their chapel not too far.”

A cluster of cream-colored two-storied concrete buildings rose up the hill. Over the drone of the engine, the boatman shouted, “Those nuns was saints. Ten of them buried in the cemetery there. Dey was French, you know. Not English.”

“If you keep on talking, we’ll miss the bay,” the inspector shouted back. I could tell he was angry. He must have known, as I did, that the boatman meant to imply that the French had done more for the sick on the island than had the English.

But the boatman was already steering the boat toward the tiny jetty, its sides buttressed with huge black rubber tires. On the shore, a group of large black vultures, the pink flesh on their long necks crimped like a turkey’s gullet, stared us down. Corbeaux. When the boat docked, they scattered. Some flew up into the trees; the rest settled stubbornly back down on the ground just a few feet away from us.

“They don’t ’fraid us,” the boatman said. “They hoping we leave them dead fish.”

Around us, stuck on the rough edges of stones on the pebbled beach, were the remains of fish, their dried guts splayed out in macabre shades of red and blue. A shudder snaked up my spine. Death everywhere: among the lepers, in the nuns’ cemetery. Vultures biding their time.

The inspector gave the boatman directions to the whereabouts of the jeep. He handed him the key and the boatman disappeared. Alone, the three of us, I felt as if we had been left stranded on the narrow shore, no way for us to get back. Across from us, a short distance through the trees, La Tinta Bay, and facing it, the fourth boca, Boca Grande. On the other side, Venezuela and the vast South American continent. The boatman could keep on walking; he could take the jeep; he could warn Father. There would be no one to help us. I fought off this feeling of dread, reminding myself that the boatman did not know Father. Why should he want to protect him? Why should he warn him? And if the boatman did not come back, we could leave when we wanted; we were not stranded. Carlos, I reasoned, could start the boat engine. But panic seized me. What if the boatman had locked the engine? Then I heard the sound of the jeep accelerating, and my heart slowed down.

When the boatman pulled up, the inspector hopped in front, in the covered closed cab of the jeep. “You two can sit in the back,” he said.

Perhaps he simply wanted to please me, perhaps he was moved by the affection he had witnessed between Carlos and me on the dock in Trinidad. Whatever his motive, I was glad he left me alone with Carlos.

There was no covering over the back of the jeep, and the wind whipped my hair and plastered it to my face. Carlos pushed it back and drew me to him. I snuggled against his chest and tried not to think of what lay ahead.
What would I say to Father when I saw him?

The boatman shifted gears, and the engine strained to climb the steep hill. Carlos tightened his arm around my shoulder. “Do you see?” He cradled my chin and turned my head to the right, where the land plunged to the sea. Below us, waves crashed against black rocks, and in the distance, the sea, a sheet of blue-green organza, shimmered.

“Look.” Carlos moved my head to the other side. Green upon green, every shade from light to dark, and mounting on tall trees, the tendrils of vines twisting and curling around branches. In between, sparks of color: orange berries, delicate lilac clusters, flowers in tints of yellow, pink, and red.

Antiseptic was the adjective I silently kept to myself for the flowers in my father’s garden that grew out of pots and on weeded beds, their colors so unnatural to me, so artificial. But nothing here was antiseptic, nothing here artificial.

“Smell,” Carlos said.

I breathed in the sweet perfume of flowers and new greenery, the metallic odor of clean earth, the salt scent of the sea. Thoughts of Father began to slip away.

“Hear that. Listen.
Cha-ca-cha-ca-Ree.
” Carlos’s voice rose softly, carried on the rush of a single breath. “
Cha-ca-cha-ca-Ree.
Listen.”

A bird whistling.

“They say the Amerindians named the island for the cotton they used to grow here. I like the other story better, the one about the Indians naming the island after a bird.”

Cha-ca-cha-ca-Ree.
I heard it now everywhere, and in between the greenery I saw the flash of yellow feathers, then blue, then red.

We wound around sharp bends in the road. More precipices, more flashes of blue sea, black rocks, white froth curling on the edges of glistening waves. More thick greenery. Color. Flowers, birds. Carlos next to me.

I could pretend we were alone, I could make believe no one was with us, no police inspector in the seat in front, next to a driver, taking us up a road leading to my father. No purpose for my being here except for Carlos. No reason to prove the innocence of the man I loved.

The boatman shifted gears again. We slowed down; the engine coughed. The boatman looked back at us through the open rear window of the cab. “Last lap,” he said. “Not to worry. We go make it.” And then, there, looming in front of us, was the lighthouse.

It was smaller than I had imagined, or it would not have seemed so small if not for the sea behind it. I saw the white tower—the black railing on top, the glass enclosure, the red cone above it, the weather vane—but all this was dwarfed by a wide slate of blue-green glass, the sea glinting, bright and mysterious. Boca Grande. Beneath its surface, La Remous simmered, and beyond, the Atlantic, the ocean I had crossed with Father.

My throat constricted with the intensity of the feeling that rushed over me: Three years old. I was begging Father to stop the ship from rolling.

Through a dark haze, I could hear the inspector asking: “The drive too much for you, too?”

I was bent over, gagging, my stomach heaving.

“All those twists and turns in the road,” the inspector was saying.

I had wrapped my arms around Father’s neck. With one hand, he was
clutching me to his chest, with the other he was holding the table steady. Wave
after gigantic wave pitched the ship up and down. The table broke free from
Father’s grip and slid across the room. Cups, saucers, the pot of tea, the plate
of biscuits, everything crashed to the floor. “Careful,” Father said. I was on his
lap, my feet dangling inches above the shards.

I pressed my hand against my mouth and swallowed. Nothing there, none of the liquid that had stung my throat when I vomited, tea and biscuits trailing down the leg of Father’s pants.

“Luckily, I didn’t have much of a breakfast.” The inspector’s voice again.

Father cleaned me up and I curled into his arms. I felt safe, protected. I was
with my father.

“Is there something I can do to help?” the inspector asked.

I peeled my eyes away from the Atlantic and forced myself to speak. My dizziness had passed, I said. I blamed my nausea on the winding road.

“Well, if you feel okay . . .”

My mouth was dry. I moistened my lips with my tongue. “It’s over,” I said.

“Okay, but stay in the jeep.”

“I want to go with you,” I said.

“No, miss,” he said.

“Please,” I begged him.

He shook his head.

“Please,” I pleaded with him again.

He drew his hand through his hair. “It’s not wise, miss.”

“She’s reached this far,” Carlos reasoned with him.

The inspector glanced sharply at him, but he did not contradict him.

“I want to go,” I said.

“It’s against my better judgment,” the inspector said, but I could tell he was weakening.

“I need to go,” I said.

“Then if you must,” he said. “But you have to hide in the bushes. I don’t want your father to see you until I’ve spoken to him.”

Across the blue sky, a big black bird, a vulture, a corbeau. It swooped down low and landed, its long, ringed legs trembling as it anchored itself on the branch of a thick-trunked tree. Around it, more corbeaux, cemetery gargoyles guarding the dead.

The inspector looked up.

“Plenty corbeaux here, too,” the boatman said.

“I wouldn’t have thought they’d come this high,” the inspector said.

“They come wherever they think they can find the dead,” the boatman said.

I wanted to be brave, but the corbeaux staring down on us chilled my heart. I clasped my hand to my mouth.

“Don’t be frightened, miss,” the boatman said. “I don’t mean dead people. I mean dead fish. Guts and fish head and things like that. Crab claws. Whatever the lighthouse keeper does throw away.”

“Come,” the inspector beckoned me. “We have no time to waste.”

The boatman stepped forward.

“Not you,” the inspector said and sent him back. “Wait for us in the jeep. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Hide there,” he told me, pointing to a place where the bushes had grown thick. “If your father is here, I will get him. Don’t move until I call you.”

I crouched down low behind the bushes. I was here to save Carlos, to make Father admit Carlos’s innocence. But the birds had stopped whistling, the leaves on the trees had stopped rustling. I had imagined this, of course, this strange quiet that descended around me, for the sound I was listening for was the sound of my father’s voice. But I did not hear my father’s voice; I did not see him. What I heard was the voice of the inspector complaining. He could hardly breathe in the stifling heat, he was saying. And the fishy smell drifting onshore from the ocean was making him nauseous. “I don’t see Dr. Gardner. Fine wild-goose chase you’ve taken me on, Codrington.”

“He’s inside the lighthouse,” I heard Carlos say.

“Then we’ll speak to the lighthouse keeper,” the inspector said.

“He bribed him,” Carlos said.

“How do you know that, Codrington?”

“When he comes here, he pays the lighthouse keeper to stay away.”

“Did you see him do that, Codrington?”

A wind blew inland from across the boca. It was a warm wind but the bushes in front of me shivered. Their leaves, thick, dense, clustered on thin stems, swayed back and forth, brushing against each other.
Swish, swish.
The sounds they made muffled Carlos’s answer.

“Well, you can’t be certain,” the inspector said.

“I’m certain you won’t find the lighthouse keeper here,” Carlos said.

I parted the bushes just wide enough to see in front of me, leaving as little open space as possible so as still to conceal me. Carlos was walking behind the inspector. They were looking upward, to the top of the lighthouse, to the platform with the black railing, below the glass enclosure. The sun was in my eyes. I squinted when I looked up, too. Nothing. No movement. Under the platform was an opening cut out of the lighthouse wall, a slit like a giant vertical eye. Behind it, darkness, an oily black thickness glinting against the whiteness of the tower.