Prospero's Daughter (17 page)

“Bat, cat, rat. Sam, Pam, jam!” Each time Gardner’s voice rose with his growing impatience, a deafening silence followed. I worried more about the silence than about the shouting itself. I felt sorry for Virginia. I wanted to help her. I cringed when I saw her tear-stained face. Yet when Gardner reemerged from his room with her, always there was a smile on his face, always his arm caressed her shoulders, always he spoke to her in loving tones, but always, in spite of his embrace and kisses, her face was pale, her eyes strained with fear and anxiety.

If Gardner loved her, it was a strange kind of love, a love that had at its center not a warm, pulsating heart, but a stone, cold, hard, unmovable. Virginia had made him angry but she would not dissuade him. He would give her kisses and hugs at the end of each lesson, but only, I felt, to ease the way for his next onslaught. Whatever the plan he had for her, he would not let her deter him. I had the feeling then, even in those early days, that behind his efforts to teach her was an intention grander and far larger than any that seemed apparent.

At the end of the week, unable to bear the silence buffeting against the rising crescendo of Gardner’s angry commands and the piercingly sorrowful glances Virginia sent my way, I decided to help her. She had been kind to me. She had loved the part of me Ariana and Gardner had tried to convince me was ugly. “Freckles,” she had said, and touched me.

The problem was to find a time and a place to be alone with her. Gardner had put Ariana in charge of her, and Ariana never let me near her. I suppose I could have gone to Virginia’s room when Ariana was with Gardner in his room, in the afternoon, but Ariana had frightened me with Gardner’s curses. “Stay away from her,” she had warned me.

One late afternoon, however, when Gardner was back in his garden after his midday nap, I got my chance. A little red bird had flown into the house. This was not an unusual occurrence. Birds often flew into the house through an open window, but they always flew out as quickly, sensing the difference in the air, the turgid stillness uninterrupted by even the merest ripple of a breeze, the domestic smells of cooked food, washed and unwashed clothing, the absence of greens and browns in trees and bushes. But this bird was different. Mistaking (I would like to believe) the flora and fauna my father had had a carpenter carve into the top panels of the interior walls of the house for real flora and fauna, it flew deeper into the house rather than out of it, passing through a wide space between the carvings of flowers into Virginia’s room.

Virginia was beside herself with joy. “A bird! A bird!” she squealed. She frightened the bird, and it flew out of her room. “Ariana! Carlos!” she called out to us. “A bird! A bird! A pretty bird! Come see!” She bolted out of her room and down the corridor. Her slippers flipflopped noisily against the wood floors and her pink cotton dress billowed out behind her.

Ariana tried to stop her. “Leave it alone. It will fly out on its own.”

But there was no stopping Virginia. She clapped her hands and hopped excitedly from one foot to the other. “I want it. I want the bird. Catch it for me, Carlos!” she pleaded with me. “Please! Please, Carlos.”

The bird, dazed and lost, flew from one partition along the corridor to the other, cawing in terror, its little wings beating rapidly against its body.

“Please, Carlos. I want to put it in my room.” She tugged my shirt. Ariana pulled her away. “No, Miss Virginia. Let it alone.”

My father would not have approved of what I did next. Many times I had begged him to trap a bird for me that had caught my fancy. I wanted to put it in a cage, to keep it in my room, to have it sing for me, but he never allowed it. “All living creatures desire freedom,” he said. “The bird will die if it cannot be free.” I fought with him. The lepers had birds that lived in cages, I told him, and he answered that he did not know one that sang as sweetly as the birds that lived free in the trees. Yet this was the first time since Virginia had come to my house that I had seen her so happy. I wanted to please her. I wanted to give her some joy after those tear-stained mornings.

“Please, Carlos,” she begged me.

I told her not to make a sound. I would catch the bird for her, but she had to be still. She must not scare it. The bird had to settle down. But when the bird settled down, it perched itself near the ceiling, on a branch carved out at the top of the wood partition, between two clutches of hibiscus flowers, far too high for me to reach it. Its little chest pumped in and out and it rolled its beady eyes at us. Then, from nervousness (or, perhaps, sheer revenge, gloating), it shat, not once, not twice, but a rain of shit that bounced off the wall, sprayed the side of my face, and fell with a splat on the floor.

Virginia was laughing hysterically and I was brushing off the excrement that had fallen on me, when, from the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Ariana biting her fingernails, and a half a second later, Gardner standing behind her.

Had she gone for him? I had not noticed when she disappeared from the room, but with the knowledge I now have of the hold Gardner had on her, the terror she must have felt of imprisonment, she might have called him, she might have been, even then, already his spy.

He was holding a broom with long green bristles. Before I could warn Virginia, he was swinging it angrily at the bird. Pieces of the wood carvings broke off as the broom struck the delicate designs at the top of the wood panels. He cursed me; he cursed the bird. Virginia implored him to stop, but neither her tears nor her words had any effect on him. He swung the broom again and again, chasing the bird through the house, all the time hollering: “Filth, filth, you filthy bastard!” The bird flew frantically into the corridor. Gardner reached up on his toes and swatted at it again. This time the bristles of the broom grazed the bird’s wing and the bird dipped downward. I rushed to catch it, but it was a strong little bird. It flapped its wings, and with heroic effort, it pulled itself upward. Before Gardner could hit it again, it found an open window.

It was gone, but Gardner was not done. “Filth, filth, you filthy bastard,” he continued to shout, his words this time directed at me.

When he calmed down, he ordered me to clean up the bird droppings. “With your bare hands,” he said, his lips curled in disgust. “Filth, like the filth you are.”

After he left, taking Virginia with him, Ariana, pitying me, handed me a bucket and a rag.

The next morning Gardner woke me up before six and ordered me to bring him plywood from the back of the house. He wanted to board up all the open spaces between the carvings at the tops of the interior walls. “Fetch the wood, you lazy bastard. Do you think all I would have you do is housework?”

I should have guessed it would have only been a matter of time before he would make me work in the garden.

I fetched the wood, and when I was done, he made me stand on a chair beside him and hand him nails that he hammered into the plywood to cover the spaces in the carvings. Afterward, he had me sweep up the chips that had fallen on the floor.

“Next week you begin,” he said. “No more lazing in the house.”

After lunch, after Ariana had followed him to his room, Virginia came into mine. She could not forget the bird. I must find it for her, she said.

I was afraid and told her to leave. Her father would punish me if he found her in my room, I said.

“They stay in there a long time,” she said.

I looked away from her, feeling strangely and unaccountably uncomfortable. “He will hear you,” I said. But she knew that could not be true. Her room was too far from his room for him to hear our whispers. Her room—my mother’s bedroom and my room after she died— was in the front of the house. Gardner had assigned me to a room in the back of the house.

“No,” she said. She came closer to me.

“You must leave,” I said.

“Ariana will be with Father a long, long time,” she said.

Sometimes longer than an hour.

“Find the bird for me,” she pleaded.

The bird was hurt and I knew I could find it easily. It had to be somewhere nearby, cowering. I had seen when the bristles of the broom struck its wing. But I lied. “I don’t think I can find it,” I said.

“Please.” She grasped my arm.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying hard to be firm, but it was not easy to resist her. A tear had pearled in the canals of her eyes, and a slight tremor had worked its way to the edges of her mouth. “I will love you forever,” she breathed in my ear. “If you find the bird for me, I will love you always.”

We were children. Neither of us had any notion then about romantic love. She was promising me friendship, loyalty, affection, and I was orphaned, no mother, no father, no one to love me afterward except Lucinda, and she was dead (I could not count on Ariana).

“Forever,” she said. And I found myself latching on to her promise for every hope it offered.

“I will love you, too,” I said. “Always.”

The next day, by the purest of good luck, I found the bird. It was crouched down on a pile of dry leaves, in a corner of the front yard, shivering. One of its wings was spread out slightly, the tips drooping down limply. When I approached it, it opened its red-rimmed eyes, but, too weak to defend itself, it shut them down again and shuddered.

Virginia called me her prince when I told her I had found the bird, and for the rest of that week, while Ariana and Gardner were in Gardner’s room, she and I nursed the bird together. I made a cast with matchsticks for its broken wing; she fed it with an eyedropper she had filled with milk and bread. We were careful. When either Ariana or Gardner was in our presence we avoided looking at each other; we did not speak to each other. We feared our excitement would brim over. We feared Ariana and Gardner would somehow sense the bond that was cementing between us, that Ariana would discover the affection we had for each other. We did not discuss these feelings; we did not plan how we should act. Instinctively, we each knew what we needed to do. So, stealing moments together to save the bird her father had almost killed, Virginia and I began our secret life together.

TEN

FIRST WE FREED the bird. It didn’t take much to convince her. She knew as well as I that her father would not let her keep it.

“It will fly away on its own when it’s ready,” I said. We were crouched over the bird. I had a razor in my hand and I was cutting the thread I had wrapped around the matchstick I had used to prop up the bird’s broken wing.

She seemed not to be listening to me, or, rather, to be listening to words I had not spoken. “Father is a kind man,” she said.

I was not surprised when she said that. I would have defended my father, but we both knew that we would not have had to tiptoe through the house, holding our breaths for fear he would hear us, had there been the slightest chance her father would have allowed us to care for the bird.

I said her father must have been a kind man when they were in England. She said she could not remember when they were in England, but she was sure he was a kind man in England. He was a kind man
now,
she said. He didn’t have a wife to help him like other men. Her mother was dead. He had to take care of her. “All by himself.” She opened her eyes wide in awe as if she thought that for him to do so required extraordinary, superhuman effort. He had told her not many fathers took care of their daughters all by themselves. She was special and she had a special father.

As she spoke, I kept my eyes focused on what I was doing. I cut the thread and stroked the bird’s wing. The wing had not healed completely, but I was certain that in a few days the bird would be able to fly. “We’ll have to bring it food,” I said, “but you won’t have to use the dropper.”

Her mind was elsewhere. “He’s teaching me to read,” she said. There was a slight flutter in her voice. “Father is nice, but I am stupid. I give him trouble.”

I did not know what she wanted from me. She could not doubt that I had heard her father shouting at her. Our eyes had met many times when she came out of his room. She could not doubt that I had seen the red streaks that marred her cheeks. Kind? Nice? He was not kind, he was not nice. Not the way my father had been kind and nice to me.

“He works hard. He tries his best. I am stupid,” she said again.

I stopped stroking the bird. “I can teach you to read,” I said.

Her eyes brightened. “You know how?”

“When I was little my mother used to read to me,” I said.

They were adult books that my mother read to me, books far advanced for my age. I fell asleep to the sound of words at night, and in the daytime, after lunch, curled next to her in the drawing room in my father’s armchair, the curtains drawn to shield us from the piercing noonday sunlight, I would nod off, rocked to sleep by vowels and consonants while my father snored in the bedroom, driven from his beloved sea by the scorching sun.

My mother would have preferred to have read children’s books to me, but there weren’t many children’s books in the stores in Trinidad. In a colony where the only escape from poverty was through education, people had neither the time nor money to waste on reading ’nancy stories to children, which they had memorized anyhow and could recite by heart. Reading was for learning, for big books that held important words, told important stories, foreign stories about foreign things, foreign facts, information they would need in order to pass English exams set and marked in England. Exams that would lead to a placement in the right secondary school and to a passport to university in the Mother Country.

My mother was not thinking of these exams when she read to me from the books she bought for herself, but these were the only books she could find, and so she settled on making them interesting to me. She dramatized everything, turning fact into stories more exciting than fiction. Which was why it was easy for me to believe that her letter that Gardner had found was not intended to blackmail Ariana, but only to scare her.

“And Churchill ordered bombs to rain on Berlin,” she would read aloud from her history books. Her hands would fly into the air; she would twist her body in horror. “Swoosh! Voom! Boom! Bang!” I saw exploding fires in the changing colors on her face, buildings blown apart, rubble tumbling into streets, people running, screaming.

It was the same when she read to me from her science books. “Homo sapiens is one little twig on the branch of life.” She would spread out her fingers and flutter them. “A twig.” And I would understand my place in the vastness of nature.

She would slow down for the big words, stretching them out as if they were elastic. “E . . . co . . . lo . . . gi . . . cal. Pa . . . ra . . . mount.” She would draw a finger under them.

I loved the big words and repeated them after her. In no time at all I could recognize them on the page. I began to notice patterns, groups of words that appeared over and over again, curves and straight lines that came together and gave me pictures. I was impatient with phonetics, bored with sounding out letters, but words, glowing above my mother’s moving finger, opened up worlds, and my imagination soared, unfettered. I inhaled the grit of busy cities, I had climbed to the tops of snowy mountains, I had crossed the great oceans. I had friends in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean who kept me company when I was lonely.

My mother indulged me, abandoning sounds for sight. I was just three when I pointed to a sentence in her book, reading it aloud to her. I was three and a half when I read a poem my father had written especially for me. By the time Gardner appeared in my front yard, the morning after that terrible storm had left Lucinda easy prey to his devious offers to help us, there was little I could not read.

When I saw Gardner with his measuring tape measuring the house, I hid my mother’s books and my father’s poems. Lucinda had dismissed my fears and handed over my mother’s money and her jewels to Gardner, but I knew better. My books comforted me when Gardner tramped through my house, changing this, changing that, boarding up the carvings my father had designed for me. They let me dream even in my waking hours.

“Bring me your book,” I said to Virginia. “I’ll show you how.”

She brought her book and I showed her how. Like me, a letter by itself was uninteresting to her, the sound it made on its own meaningless. But she saw pictures when I read to her, and eager for more, she followed my fingers, lapping up sentence after sentence as I read. In two weeks she could read the little book Gardner had given to her.

I believe it was not only the pictures she saw when I read to her that caused her to learn to read so quickly. She was relaxed with me. There was no tension vibrating between us, invisible but ever present to intimidate her. She had nothing to prove with me. She knew no matter what, whether she learned to read or not, I would love her.

Always,
I had sworn to her when she said
forever,
and she believed me. I think even if her father had said
always
and
forever,
she would not have been so sure, for she seemed to know, even as a small child, that his love had a price.

As Gardner had threatened, he took me to his garden. He was building a growing house at the edge of the backyard, setting the stage for plans he had already begun to put into effect, converting my house and the land it stood on to his idea of paradise, to his England. The week before, a boatload of glass windowpanes in wood frames had arrived. I thought they were for the house but Gardner ordered the men to stack them in the backyard. They were for his plants, he told me.

“Only primitive man accepts life the way Nature has presented it to him,” he said. “The civilized man uses his brain to make his world better.”

I was facing the sun and when I squinted my eyes to deflect the glare, my eyebrows converged and he mistook my wrinkled brow for the start of a question.

“I’m talking about brains,” he explained. “It takes brains, reason, intelligence, to grow flowers that won’t wilt in the sun, plants that will live forever.” He pointed his finger to his temple and I understood he meant
his
brains, not any ordinary brains. Not my brains, for example. For in the afternoons, after his midday siesta, he went alone to his garden. To think and experiment, he said to me, making it clear that these were realms quite outside my capabilities.

One morning, many weeks later, as I was carrying a bucket of water to him, which he used to water the tiny shoots that had sprung up from the seeds he had planted in boxes, I noticed he was moving his head slightly from side to side. As I got closer, I realized he was humming. It was not a tune I knew, but it had a lilt to it, a merry rhythm that corresponded with the movement of his head on his neck. I was so shocked to see him in such a pleasant mood that I stood rooted to the ground. The last time I had heard him sing (if chanting can be called singing) was when he pranced like a horse around the fire he had made with the pieces of my mother’s bed. He motioned to me to come closer, and, apprehensive, though nothing in his face suggested I had any reason to be fearful, I walked slowly toward him. He patted me on my head when I reached next to him. “You’re turning out to be quite a helper, Carlos,” he said.

I should have known not to trust him, but I was starved for affection and he was praising me, the first time since he had laid eyes on me. My lips stretched back in a wide smile, my teeth glittered in the sun.

“Yes, quite a helper,” he said, and dipped his watering cup into the bucket. “Most suited to this work.”

I could have burst into tears at that very moment, but I bit down hard on my lip and my tears retreated. I hated the work he was making me do. I hated fetching things for him, standing by his side waiting for his orders:
Fetch the bag of manure. Fetch the spade. Bring me those seeds.
I hated being his servant, and yet, I must confess, I felt an uncanny sense of pride when I worked next to him.

He had given me a uniform that he had ordered from Trinidad. He wore one, too, his, like mine, khakis—khaki shirt, khaki pants—though I had shorts and he long pants. “Everyone in his place, everything in its time.” (He never passed up a chance to reinforce his lesson about the hierarchical order of the social pyramid.)

The garden he was constructing was a laboratory, he said. He was a scientist, not a common gardener. When he was finished, the world would see flowers that man could only dream of now. Foolishly, I allowed myself to be swept by his fantasy into a fantasy of my own: I imagined that he wanted me to bask in the glow of his glory.

He didn’t seem to notice my silence when I did not respond to his twisted praise, or perhaps he assumed my concurrence. “My daughter, for example,” he continued happily, “is more suited to work indoors. But you, you will make your money with your brawn, Carlos.” He poked his finger into my arm, where the weight of the bucket, heavy with water, had caused my puny muscles to rise. I almost lost my balance.

“Steady, boy. Here. Put the bucket down.” He took the bucket from me and placed it on the ground. “Books,” he sighed, “books can get you in trouble.”

I could only assume that he had excluded himself from the
you
that books could harm, for he was always with his books. Even in the garden, in the afternoons when I was not with him, he had his books, the red leather-bound one always with him.

“Look up. Look up,” he said. “There’s no shame in making your living with your brawn, boy.” He clutched my chin roughly and lifted it up. “Good. That’s it.” Then he surprised me. “Can’t tell you the trouble books brought me,” he said. His shoulders sagged.

“Trouble?” I didn’t believe him.

He bade me pick up the bucket and follow him, and as he watered the seedlings, he told me his story. He said that while he was preoccupied with his books, learning all he could so that he could be the best doctor he was capable of becoming, his brother was betraying him, ingratiating himself with their parents. He told me nothing about the incident at the hospital that made him a man on the run. He said that somehow his brother got his parents to change their will. “He sucked up to them,” he said, “and sucked them dry. When they died, all their money and property were his.”

“Why didn’t you ask the police to help you?” I asked him.

“My brother bribed the police,” he said. “He gave them money to keep them quiet.”

“Is that why you came here?” I asked.

His eyes darkened. “Get me the trowel,” he barked. “Hurry up. Quick, march.”

I ran to the shed, scared that I had made him angry. Lucinda, too, had wanted to know, but she had never dared ask why our isolated island when there was England.

I returned with the trowel. He snatched it from my hand and grunted, “I’ll tell you since you want to know.” He began digging into the dirt, his back toward me. “I wanted to do my part for the Empire. We have a responsibility, a duty, to take care of our colonies. I wanted to fulfill my obligation. That is it.” He straightened up. “Take you.” He faced me. “I’ll teach you a trade. Book learning, my boy, is not all there is.” He tapped the trowel against the side of his pants. “My brother had book learning, but book learning is not what made him rich.”

“What made him rich?” I asked quietly.

“Cunning.” He turned his attentions abruptly to the tiny shoots that had popped up in some of the boxes. Most of them had wilted, their tops hanging limply over their little stalks. “Too much sun,” he grumbled. “When I build the growing house, this won’t happen.” He put down the trowel and lifted up one of the boxes and had me pick up another. “Can’t leave them here. Plants need light, but not this burning sun. Come.” I followed him to the shed where my father stored his tools. “That’s why I need the growing house. Understand?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “The windowpanes. You asked about the windowpanes. They are for the roof of the growing house. To control the temperature.”

Something fell on the top of my head, a bird’s feather perhaps, for suddenly there was a loud cawing above us and a wide swath of green closed up part of the sky. Green-feathered parrots on their way to the mangrove in Trinidad.