Prospero's Daughter (15 page)

How does a child, even if only five, blot out that memory? How does he forget the rain of tears that fell down his mother’s face, or her deadening silence afterward, when she did not eat, did not bathe? When he hated the stench of her body and ran from her in disgust, even when she begged for his embrace? When, in less than a month, whispering his name, the name of his father also, she breathed her last breath?

I believe that Gardner spoke of my mother in this disparaging way to ease whatever shred of conscience he had left that pricked his soul in the night. Perhaps I give him more credit than is warranted. Perhaps he had no soul, or if he had, it was so tattered and torn with sin as to have barely existed at all. But it is also possible that in his diseased mind he had convinced himself that my mother had polluted the house and, therefore, had not deserved it.

My father thought my mother bewitching; Gardner called her a witch.

I grasp at straws no doubt, but there are days I seem to need to find some logic,
something,
that would help me make sense of Gardner’s unrelenting arrogance, his overweening hubris. He had come to us homeless, an unwanted lodger in the old doctor’s home, and yet he believed that we should be indebted to him and not the other way around. His bold-faced presumptions still astound me to silence, that he should act as if he thought he had discovered us, as if before his arrival we had not existed at all!

EIGHT

BUT I LIKED his daughter right from the start, and not only because her eyes were the color of mine and reminded me of my mother’s. That first day, while Dr. Gardner was trying to persuade Lucinda that we needed his help, I caught her looking at me. When my eyes met hers, she ducked behind her father’s back, but later that day, when Gardner returned with all his belongings, which were few—two duffel bags and a satchel strapped to his back, which led me foolishly to hope that his stay with us would not be long—she looked up at me again and this time she smiled. Her two front teeth were missing, and the pink gap on her gums was wide. I would have kept my lips closed if my front teeth were missing, but she spread hers apart and waved at me. At the top of the front steps, she stretched her hand toward me. I bent down and she touched my face.

“Freckles,” she said.

She was walking behind her father. He spun around and pulled her hand away. “Freckled,” he murmured gruffly. His eyes were stern, threatening.

That was how Virginia and I began—with a bond struck instantly between us by the similarity of the color of our eyes, and a kindness she extended to me that I greedily accepted.

For I
was
self-conscious of the tiny brown dots that covered most of my body, though less so on my face. Only a few months earlier Ariana had convinced me that they were hideous. I had been accustomed at the time to bathing outdoors, from the standpipe at the back of the house. I would strip off my clothes regardless of who was there to see me: Ariana or Lucinda or anyone else. I thought no more of the appendage hanging between my legs than of a convenience necessary when my bladder needed emptying, and my freckles, no different from my blue eyes, odd, because I had seen them on no one else, but familiar because they were mine. One day, probably because she was tired of the attention Lucinda was paying to me (my father had just been killed and my mother had died soon after), Ariana pointed to my sex and jeered: “Look at that teeny, weeny little thing you have.”

“So what?” I said. My penis had shriveled under the cold water and was a knob lying limp next to my scrotum.

“So what, you stupid boy? Girls not going to like you, that’s what.”

“I don’t care if girls don’t like me,” I struck back.

“You wait and see. When you get big, you going to want them to like you, and they not going to like you because your thing too small.”

Instinctively, I cupped my hand over my penis.

“And, mostly,” she added, taking pleasure in my discomfort, “girls not going to like you because you polka dot.”

I looked down at my body, my thin arms and legs, the stump between my upper thighs, the brown spots that marred my skin, and for the first time I felt ugly, for the first time I knew shame. I became conscious of a self apart from the self of the carefree boy I was, a boy who spent his days and nights with no awareness of his physical self except when the need required it, except when the urges of his bodily functions demanded it, a boy who reveled in the delights of the world around him: white clouds drifting with the wind across a sun-filled blue sky; the bay still, silent, and glittering before the coming of a rainstorm; birds whose whistles he was learning to imitate by heart; trees he climbed without fear; cicadas whose crying in the night brought him comfort when grief over the death of his parents seemed unbearable. The thousand twangling instruments he heard in the whisper of a breeze, in the rustle of leaves in the bushes.

I was too young, of course, when Ariana made me ashamed of my freckles to have arrived at the conclusion that shocked that monk at Mount St. Benedict, but it was likely that the seeds of the war I would wage with the story in Genesis were planted then. I date the awakening of my conscious self to that singular event at the standpipe. There were penalties: the loss of innocence, the loss of bliss—the same penalties doled out to Adam when he was expelled from the garden and felt ashamed of his nakedness. But by the time I was seventeen, the age I was when Gardner imprisoned me, I had come to believe that the advantages far outweighed the penalties, and Adam became my hero. The exchange he made for Eden seemed to me better than the alternative: happiness with no cognizance of bad and ugly, and therefore no consciousness of good and beauty. For how to know good except by knowledge of what is bad, of what it is not? How to know beauty except by knowledge of what is ugly, of what it is not?

Sometimes, baffled by Gardner’s outrageous arrogance, his cool assumption of superiority over me, I would try to make sense of his behavior in the light of this logic. Perhaps Gardner thought this way, too. Perhaps he said to himself:
I am unfreckled and pale, and Carlos is
what I am not, and therefore he is ugly. I am good, and Carlos is not what I
am, and therefore he is bad. I speak with an English accent, and Carlos does
not, and therefore he gabbles like a thing most brutish; therefore he does not
know his own meaning.

But shame was all I felt that day at the standpipe, and I began to see my freckles as a sort of disfigurement (Ariana, when her mother could not hear her, would keep reminding me that they were). The next time I bathed at the standpipe, I put on my underpants.

Virginia’s smile and touch restored in me the possibility of ease with my body, for when her hand caressed my face, brushing it with her sunshine, I was no longer that ugly boy Ariana said I was. “Freckles,” Virginia said, and smiled at me. Gardner countered,
Freckled,
but he was already too late.

I was not the only one, however, who profited from Virginia’s generous smile. The boatman who brought Virginia and her father to our island said that when the villagers at Cocorite, in Trinidad, first saw Gardner on the beach raking the sand for scraps of fish the fishermen had left behind, his flaming red hair draped down to his shoulders and the forked branch in his hand put them in mind of the devil, just as they had done me. They would have stayed far away from him and burned candles to ward off his evil spirit if it weren’t for his daughter, they said, for she smiled and won their hearts.

In those days, while Gardner waited for the contact his brother had made to materialize and squirrel him away to Chacachacare, Virginia’s hair was wild and unruly. I still find it hard to envision her hair this way, because when Gardner moved in with the doctor and got his hands on scissors, he did what he always did when confronted with disorder in nature: he trimmed, he slashed, he pushed back. So Virginia’s hair was short and cut close to her head when I met her. But then, on the beach at Cocorite, masses of blond curls encircled her tiny face. When the sun struck the light wisps of hair, fraying at the ends, she glowed. Like an angel, the boatman said. The villagers wanted to protect her. They fed her, and because he was her father, they fed him, too.

It astonishes me still that he was not grateful. They had saved his life and had never asked for a penny.

Maybe it was the fuss they made over his daughter that gave Gardner this sense of privilege. Maybe something more malign. Though I know now he was an escapee from the law, a man for whom knowledge was its own reward, to be acquired without regard for his fellow men, perhaps in his mind he thought he was better than us, that what the villagers had done for him was no more than he was due. He was, after all, on an island that was part of his country’s empire. He was an Englishman.

Even before he burned my mother’s bed, Dr. Gardner had begun making changes in my house to erase my memory. Our food was to be cooked differently, not the way my mother used to cook it. My mother used pepper in her food, and seasoned the meat with vinegar or limes and with lots of garlic, onion, chives, and herbs, just as other women did in the Caribbean.

My mother had learned to cook this way in Africa. She was born in Algiers to English parents, in a country colonized by the French and native to Arabs and Africans. Her English parents must have felt alienated twice over in that place, strangers in a strange land where even the Europeans were foreign to them. And their daughter, too, must have seemed alien to them, swaddled in cloths they could not have recognized and snuggled in the arms of the black-skinned midwife who brought her to them in that hot, sticky room where she was born, in a hospital in Algiers. The pungent smells, the vibrating whir of an overhead fan whose purpose was not so much to ease the oppressive heat as to chase away the flies that were forever buzzing around the breasts of nursing mothers, must have repelled my grandparents.

My mother told me many stories about her life in Africa. As I grew older, I began to make sense of all she had told me. I understood that her parents hated Africa. They tolerated Africa only for the money they could make. They were in the import-export business, importing exquisitely handwoven rugs they bought for a song from Arab traders, and exporting them to rich buyers in the West. The business kept them busy, so busy they had little time left over for a daughter. They put her in the care of a nanny who was an Algerian. Black, not Arab. The black, not Arab, Algerian taught my mother everything: about her gods, about her history, about the days when the white man came with sweet words about his god of love, his god of brotherhood, his god who declared all men equal, who loved them all the same. She told my mother about the resistance of her people and the white man’s impatience: The Bible took too long; the gun was more persuasive.

My mother’s parents knew nothing of what the African nanny was teaching their daughter, except that she had taught my mother her language. For this they were grateful. At ten years old, my mother was already their interpreter, translating for them from Arabic to French, from French to English. But they had not counted on my mother loving Africa. When they left her upbringing to an African, they did not think she would fall in love with an African. They were aware, when she was in primary school, that her playmates were African, but in the colonies, African children were allowed to play with European children, to amuse them, to entertain them. That all came to an end, of course, when the European children crossed the threshold into adolescence. Then, the European children were in training to don the mantle of their parents; then, it was time for them to learn about their awe-some heritage, their terrible burden. Then, there could be no commingling with the inferior, no fraternizing with the native. My mother never learned these lessons. Left in the hands of an African nanny, she learned what the African taught her, she loved what and whom the African loved.

Ultimately my mother became an embarrassment for her parents when her friendships with Africans persisted into secondary school. Nothing, however, was more embarrassing, more shameful, for them than my mother’s announcement, on her twenty-first birthday, that she was in love with an African. My father, it seemed, was not the first black man my mother loved.

Soon after that birthday, the African disappeared. My mother blamed her parents. She cut off her relationships with the few European friends she had, believing that they, too, had a part in her lover’s disappearance. Day and night she searched for him in the African quarters. Humiliated by my mother’s persistence, her unbridled passion for a black African, my mother’s parents tried to bribe her with clothes, jewels, money. My mother took them all, and, convinced that she would never see her lover again, left for a cruise around the world.

On the cruise ship the word got out. Gossip spread.
Nigger lover.
That’s what the sailors called my mother behind her back.
A partying
nigger lover.

In Gardner’s version of the story, the sailors threw my mother overboard when the ship reached the Caribbean. It was the version he chose to believe and thought justified, but my mother told me a different story: After my father rescued her, she walked off the ship on her own.

Sometimes I think the truth is somewhere in between. Perhaps when my mother returned to the cruise ship, after my father rescued her, it had not been her intention to leave. Perhaps the sailors had laughed at her when she came onboard, leaning on the arm of a black man.
Nigger lover.
It is likely that was what they called her.

The way to a man’s heart.
Lucinda would laugh and wink at me when she said it was my mother’s cooking, what my mother had learned from her African nanny, that bound my father to her. For my father would eat food cooked by no one else, not even by Lucinda. Every morning my father took my mother with him on his pirogue and they would drift far out into the bay, though not too far (for the threat of the drug lords was always present), and my mother would lay her head on his lap and he would compose poem after poem that poured from his heart like music.

“It’s all that good food your mother cooking for him,” Lucinda said.

Ariana took her words literally. When Lucinda could not stand longer than ten minutes without clutching her knees as pain knifed through her from the cancer that was eating her insides, Ariana became our cook. Lucinda called out instructions from her bed and Ariana did as she was told.

In the beginning Gardner seemed pleased. He praised Ariana lavishly. The chicken was tender, the fish was fresh, the vegetables crisp, just as he liked them, he said. Magnificent. He would smile his false smiles and pat his lips with his napkin, a formality he insisted on (he had cut some fabric in squares and given each of us one), and Ariana would wilt before him, her eyes sweeping the floor, her lips twitching in an effort to suppress her delight. So greedy did she seem for his attention that I believed she heard nothing more. But I was not fooled. I heard the
buts
as Gardner pushed his chair away from the table: “But less pepper next time.” “But less salt next time.” “But not red pepper. Pepper, but black pepper.”

Soon Ariana was strutting around the house with an air of self-importance, ordering me around. “Cut it this way, Carlos,” she would say in an officious tone when I helped her in the kitchen. “
He
likes it this way.” She acted as if Gardner had promoted her to chief of staff in his household, which I suppose she was, chief of a staff of one, namely of me. She had to speak to Gardner about this or that, she would say, never naming what this or that was. I always thought it was about cooking, never guessing that, after Lucinda died, her many visits to Gardner’s room had nothing at all to do with cooking.