Prospero's Daughter (19 page)

I never asked him what he did in the garden alone, or why he did not require my help. I was happy to be left with my books, happy to be relieved of the backbreaking work he made me do. For in the garden I was his servant, his slave. He gave orders, I obeyed them even when sweat blinded my eyes, my back ached, my shoulders sagged, and the muscles in my arms and legs tore at the ligaments. I plowed beds for his flowers, planted seedlings, fetched buckets of water, carried bags of manure on my back, nailed, hammered, lifted heavy planks of wood, whatever he demanded. If I was slow, if I didn’t fetch and carry fast enough for him, he called me names: tortoise, which irked me but never as much as when he yelled “Slave!” or when, fully aware of the pain he caused me, he screamed out “Hagseed,” reminding me, in spite of her books, her education, her British upbringing, what he thought of my mother. It was hard then to keep my tongue in my mouth, yet I did not complain though my blood boiled. I did not complain because while I worked, he talked. He opened up worlds to me. He convinced me that I was with him on the threshold of scientific discoveries that would make it possible to grow sturdier and more beautiful flowers, flowers that could survive a brutal sun or drought that lasted for weeks. “Breeding,” he said. “It’s all about good breeding. Breeding until you achieve the perfect specimen.”

I was not deterred though I had no doubt that he also wanted me to understand that he was breeding me. My seed might have been planted in a hag, but his nurture would make me better than my mother.

He showed me how to create a new flower by grafting the stem of one flower onto the stem of another; how to do the bee’s work and spread pollen from one plant onto the stamen of another. But I did not believe that grafting and cross-pollinating were the only magic he used to change the texture of petals on roses, to make bougainvillea bloom in colors that were shocking to me—the polka dots and the stripes especially—or to grow the strange new grass that was springing up in the front yard. I suspected there was more he could tell me. I had my theories but I had never recovered from my initial fear of his book, his cape, and his cane, so I kept my suspicions to myself. I did not pry though I was sure that he did not want me with him when he went to the garden alone because there was power in that cape and in that cane and in the words written down in his red leather-bound book, and he did not want to share that power with me.

He would, he swore, civilize me, but he had set limits, a ceiling beyond which he firmly excluded me. Whatever was written in his red leather-bound book, whatever knowledge it contained that gave him the ability to make flowers and grass bend to his will was knowledge he wanted to keep from me.

And yet he taught me much more than about plants. While I worked, he taught me about astronomy, about the sun and the moon (about which I already knew much), but more than that, about the smaller planets, the ones twinkling in the darkened sky and the ones I could not see. I learned the basics of biology from him and the fundamentals of chemistry. He introduced me to physics and the laws of mathematics. In the evenings, after dinner, and after he had sent Virginia to her bedroom, he spent hours with me playing the music he loved on his gramophone. He conducted when we listened to Mozart or Beethoven or Chopin or Tchaikovsky, and I would lose myself in the sweep and sway of singing instruments, but he wanted me to know their individual sounds. In time he opened up my ears so that I was able to distinguish the cello among the strings, to hear the violin under the viola, to identify the flute and the piccolo among the woodwinds, to pick out French horns from trombones, trombones from tubas, English horns from oboes.

He was especially affected by Beethoven’s
Eroica
symphony. Many times I saw a tear roll down his cheek when the needle moved to the adagio, and, it seemed to me, as the somber beat of the funeral march filled the room, that he was in the grip of a memory, mourning the loss of someone he once loved. It did not take long for me to conclude that that someone was his wife, for when we listened to the operas he loved, he would close his eyes and, clutching the ends of his collar, he would pull them tightly together across his neck and sigh. “Only the Italians,” he would say, “know the sweet pain of love.”

I did not understand a word of the arias he played on his gramophone and yet when a voice swelled to bursting, I was moved, too, as he was, every fiber of my being consumed by feelings I could not explain.

O mio babbino caro.

The music would transform him. The muscles in his face would slacken, and the furrows, seemingly permanent between his eyebrows, would disappear. He was a young man again. I could not find on his face the markings of the bitter despot who was always on a mission to search out disease in every natural thing, or the stern taskmaster who regulated my every day, my every hour.

e se l’amassi indarno,
andrei sul Ponte Vecchio,
ma per buttarmi in Arno!

I would think it was madness that had made me see a devil when he came to my yard after the storm. Madness or a mind not yet healed from my mother’s blank eyes, her indifferent dismissal of me, her grief-stricken face before she turned away from me. On those occasions when I witnessed the effect that music had on him, he seemed a gentle man, a kind man, a compassionate man. I could not imagine then such a man capable of the cruelties he was yet to inflict on me.

Sometimes, instead of listening to music, our evenings were spent discussing books he had me read in the afternoons while he was in his garden. He talked endlessly of Shakespeare and Milton, the giants, he said, of all literature written in English, whether American or Canadian. He would quote
Lycidas
to me when he felt the need to explain, when the questions in my eyes pushed him to explain, why he had chosen here, our tiny island, a leper colony, with no running streams, no rivers, to build his botanical laboratory.

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

He would shake his head and cast his eyes upward, as if to the heavens, when he recited that line. The timbre of his voice would change; it would darken and grow soulful. And hearing him recite Milton, I would forget the man I knew, the man who loved me to flatter him, the man whose ambition, as he reminded me constantly, was to surprise the world with the strange flowers he created. It was not hard then for me to fool myself into thinking of him as he wanted me to think of him: as a spiritual man, a man who did not care for praise, for earthly recognition.

He had me memorize long passages from the works he admired and on our walks at night I repeated them for him, giving him much pleasure, and, I will admit, myself much pleasure and comfort, too. For there were times, especially in my late adolescence, when black clouds pressed upon me and I fell deep into the clutches of an overwhelming grief and longing for parents I had only known briefly. These times came mostly on dark nights when rain thundered incessantly, drumming a funeral beat on the rooftop. Then I was glad for lines he had had me memorize:

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globéd peonies

I did not know the green hill, a meadow I supposed the poet had in mind. I knew thick forest trees and entangling vines, greens in shapes and shades fanciful and bright, though others so dark, so dense, they could fill me with dread. The rain on my rooftop was not so gentle as an April shower, but it, too, like the poet’s rain, set me off to mourning. And though I had no morning roses or globéd peonies, I had the smell of the sea, the salt sand-wave, the rainbow. And I would think of them and find comfort in the poet’s verse.

The education I was getting from Gardner was British; it was European. But the poems spoke to me and I found myself in them. It bothered me, of course, that Gardner rarely mentioned Africa, that he said not a kind word about the Amerindians who originally populated the islands. On the rare occasions when he did, he made me understand that my history, the history of my island and the islands in the Caribbean, began with him, began with his people. Before the arrival of his people we were nothing—wild, savage creatures who had accomplished nothing, achieved nothing, had made not one iota of contribution to the advancement of human civilization. But I was too eager to learn, too greedy for the knowledge he was giving me to fault him, and for years I forgave him. For years I was grateful.

I look back now and it amazes me that I allowed myself to be so grateful, that I submitted myself to such an exclusively European education, willingly taking the risk of losing faith in my people, respect for the traditions of my forefathers. The year Trinidad gained its independence from England a famous Trinidadian writer living in England published a book about our history. “How can the history of this West Indian futility be written?” he asked, his question resonating with the scorn I had heard in Gardner’s voice. “Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.”

TWELVE

I GAVE BACK what I could. I showed Gardner my secret places on the island. I took him over the barbed-wire fence the Americans had built that stretched across the middle of the island from Rust’s Bay, near where we lived, around the leprosarium, and down to Perruquier Bay, a mile or so north of the nuns’ quarters.

The Americans had come to Trinidad during the war when England was in trouble. Twelve thousand acres they got in exchange for fifty battleships, none new. We were an English colony. There was no need to get our permission. Twelve thousand acres cut across central Trinidad at Waller Field, and along the northwest coast in Chaguaramas, and on the north of Chacachacare, our little island.

We would have been safe from the Germans if it were not for the oil belt sliding under the sea from Venezuela into the south of Trinidad. When their tanks ran dry, German U-boats trolled the Caribbean Sea, searching desperately for fuel.

Naïvely, Trinidad believed it was protected. The Dragon stood guard at the entrance of the Gulf of Paria, and La Remous swirled through her teeth, currents and countercurrents slamming violently into each other, catapulting against the sheer cliffs and tumbling back down like a cataract, the sea turning into a seething pool that rushed with breakneck speed in and out of crevices in the rocks.

Then, one night, under the cover of a starless sky, a German U-boat sneaked into the Port of Spain harbor. Days later, a German officer produced a movie stub from the Globe, a cinema in the heart of the city. He had eaten well, gone to the movies, slept with a woman, he boasted. All done under the eyes of English and American soldiers.

The Americans wasted no time. They laid down mines. La Remous fought back. Cables snapped like dry twigs in her powerful hands. Mines broke free and curled down her whirlpool. Days later, La Remous vomited them in the Atlantic. Some drifted as far as Cuba. Ships and schooners exploded, not all of them the enemy’s. One, a wedding party from Grenada, blown to bits, not a single person spared. The Dragon licked its lips and swallowed.

Before the Americans went back home, they swept the ocean. Thirty-five mines had escaped the Dragon. Or so the Americans believed. Not so the nuns, who, though they dreamed of more space for their leprosarium, feared to go beyond the American barrier.

But my father had taken me there. I had ridden on his shoulders when he cut his way through the fence to the road that led to the lighthouse on the highest point, on the north shore of the island. It was from there I first saw La Remous. Years later, whenever I heard her terrifying growl as she swooped through the Dragon’s teeth, I would think of the witches’ cauldron in
Macbeth,
the sea its lethal brew, bubbling, boiling.

I told Gardner I could take him to the lighthouse. I said that even if some mines had washed up on the beach, it was impossible for any of them to be near the lighthouse, for the lighthouse was on high ground, at the top of the tallest point on the island. He pestered me with questions about land mines, but I reasoned with him that the Americans had no cause to plant land mines. They had their guns trained on the sea; they could shoot the enemy down.

What about the lighthouse? he asked me. I answered that the Dragon took care of the lighthouse. He would see, when he got there, that though at first the land sloped gently downward, after a few yards it fell with a sheer drop into the Dragon’s Mouth.

He was satisfied, eager to hear more, pleased when I told him about the barracks the Americans had built. Nine in all, one not far from where we lived, in the bushes, in the back of my house. When I took him there, he ripped off wood, metal, and glass for his greenhouse. A few weeks later, he wanted me to take him to the lighthouse.

The Americans had built a paved road to the lighthouse that began at Perruquier Bay, almost opposite to where we were, behind Rust’s Bay. To reach the paved road, we had to pass along a dirt road, in front of the leper colony. Gardner never wanted to be anywhere near the leper colony. He acknowledged that it wasn’t as easy, as was rumored, to catch the disease, but he was unwilling to take chances with his life and his daughter’s life. He didn’t want to bring germs back with him to the house, he said. So we went the way I had gone with my father to the lighthouse, up the hill following the trail that connected the barracks, until near the top we branched off and took the paved road.

It was not an easy climb. It had been years since the Americans had been on the island, and few had used that path since then. It was overgrown with razor grass. Branches of trees, given free rein, dipped down low over us, but in between the canopy of green leaves were splashes of color: bouquets of tiny orange berries; pink, yellow, red, lavender flowers. I spotted a savonnetta tree, stunning with its translucent leaves and purplish flowers. The wood the carpenter had used to carve out birds and flowers in the panels in my house had come from the savonnetta, but I did not tell Gardner that when I pointed out the tree. I did not want him cutting it down for floorboards or using it to make himself a desk or a chair or some other piece of furniture for the house. I warned him, though, about the poisonous manchineel tree. I had seen the berries scattered on the top of the incline ahead of us. They were small, no more than an inch in diameter, greenish-yellow, apple-shaped.
Little green apples.
He must have thought so, too, for when one of them tottered at the edge and began to roll downward, he broke away from me and ran toward it. “Apples.” The word fluttered out of his mouth, nostalgia so gripping his heart that he seemed to have forgotten where he was, his war with tropical fruits smothered in that moment. “No! No!” I shouted as he lunged for it. “Stop!” I slapped my hand around his wrist.

I startled him. He jumped back, but he recovered instantaneously. “Don’t you ever.” He shook his finger at me. “Don’t you ever raise your voice at me.” His bottom lip was trembling.

Out of perversity, for I was certain he understood that I was trying to warn him about the danger of touching the fruit of the manchineel, or, perhaps, because he saw another occasion to drive home to me that he was the master and I his underling, he stuck out his hand again. I pulled it back.

“No! Don’t touch it.” I tightened my grasp. “It will make you sick.”

Did he thank me?

I told him that even water falling off the leaves of the manchineel would leave blisters on his skin. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his hands, inside and outside, over and over again obsessively. When he was done, he handed the handkerchief to me.

“Tell Ariana to wash it,” he said, then changed his mind. “No, tell her to burn it.”

Did he thank me? Suppose he had bitten into the berry, suppose it had not only given him blisters but cramps that twisted his stomach into knots. Suppose it had poisoned him fatally.

“Everything on this island is diseased,” he said bitterly. He berated himself for his moment of weakness, for allowing nostalgia to betray him.

We saw huge green iguanas on the dirt trail, the spikes on their backs metallic armor. They flicked their long tails and stared at us, the covering over their large protruding eyes opening and shutting like blinkers. I did not think they would move but Gardner stamped his cane into the ground and in an instant they were gone.

Several times we heard swishing sounds in the bushes near us. Something moving under the trees. A snake? The possibility that he might have been poisoned by a manchineel berry had shaken Gardner, but a snake gave him not a moment’s trepidation.

We saw the pointed red cap of the lighthouse first, with the weather vane at its peak, a fish made out of black wrought iron, an arrow for its head. Below it, the glass circular enclosure gleamed in the sun behind an iron railing at the edge of a narrow platform. As we got closer, we could see the white tower clearly, thick and solid except for a single opening, a sliver of glass, like an elongated eye, glinting under the platform. The lighthouse keeper was sitting on the green ledge at the base of the lighthouse. As soon as he spied us, he jumped up and came running toward us, his face a ripple of wide grins.

“Don’t have many people coming up here.” He slapped my back so hard I reached over my shoulders to massage it. “Just me and my partner,” he said to Gardner and held out his hand. Gardner shook it but not with the same enthusiasm.

“I so glad to see you. Is only two of us and the sea. It get lonely here.”

Gardner wasted no time. “Just the two of you?” He was looking up at the lighthouse, his face twitching with nervous excitement. It occurred to me that had I been able to see him when he first set eyes on my mother’s house, I would have witnessed the same twitching, the same nervousness, the same restrained excitement on his face.

“My partner gone to La Tinta.”

La Tinta Bay. It was south of where we were, named by the Spanish settlers for its black sand that made the water seem the color of ink. My father used to fish in La Tinta Bay but he had never taken me there.

“And left you all alone?”

“We have to eat,” the lighthouse keeper shrugged. “Two weeks we stay here at a time. Somebody have to fish.”

“Why not fish here?”

“You ever eat La Tinta fish? Sweetest in the world. And don’t talk about crab. They big like lobster at La Tinta.” He opened his arms wide.

“Big like that?” I asked, amazed, my arms extended wider than his.

Gardner kicked my foot and looked sternly at me. “How long does he stay there?” he asked.

The lighthouse keeper, momentarily confused, looked from me to Gardner and back again.

“Your partner,” Gardner said and drew back his attention. “How long does he stay at La Tinta?”

“Is he you want to see?”

I was looking around me. All the trees my father had planted, all the trees Gardner had cut down, all here: mango trees, breadfruit trees, guava trees, pawpaw trees, lime trees. In a square patch of dirt bordered by planks of wood, not far from the lighthouse, were the brittle stems of dead plants. Tomato or peppers, I thought.

“We does grow our food, too,” the lighthouse keeper said, pleased with my interest. “Pigeon peas, tomato, cabbage, things like that. Onliest problem, we have to wait for rain.”

Gardner did not have to wait for rain. He stored his rainwater. Created it, my childish mind had once fantasized, awed by all that green in our front yard, even in the dry season.

“When are you expecting him?” Gardner’s head was tilted back on his neck, his eyes fixed on the top of the lighthouse.

“My partner?” The lighthouse keeper turned away from me.

“Yes. When?” Gardner was getting impatient.

“Late, late. Sometime he stay at La Tinta whole day. Come back late evening. You know him?”

“No, no,” Gardner said quickly. “I came to see the lighthouse. Can you let me in?”

“It never lock. Excepting if both me and my partner gone.”

“So you can take me inside?”

“Yes. Come with me rong the corner.”

We walked behind him and he led us to the other side of the lighthouse, to a tall, enormous, weather-beaten wood door. Just as he was about to open it, he shook his head sadly. “Not many people does come here,” he said. “I tell you it does really get lonely sometimes.”

Gardner thought it wise to sympathize. “But you have the sea,” he said.

“It pretty now, but don’t come back when it storm. Sometimes the lightning here come so fast, the night never have a chance to get dark.”

How could I have known that the lighthouse keeper’s words were just what Gardner was hoping to hear?

We followed the lighthouse keeper up the narrow black spiral staircase in the middle of the lighthouse tower. At the top were huge round plates of glass that revolved behind a circular glass wall when the light was turned on at night. Along one side of the walls, rising slightly above the floor, was another door, a short, metal one, thick and heavy as the door on a vault, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through but only if he bent on all fours. When the lighthouse keeper opened it, the wind rushed in, howling and baying.

Gardner was the first to go through the tiny door to the ledge outside. I followed. Over the roar of the wind, I heard him chant: “All this, all this.” He was leaning against the railing, the wind whipping his body into a flagpole, his shirt and pants like sails flung stiffly out behind him. Below us was the fourth boca of the Dragon’s Mouth, the widest of the four mouths of the Dragon yet no less treacherous. Waves slammed into rocks that rose dark and jagged above the surface waters, pitching white foam high in the air that bounced back down, striking rock and water with ferocious force.

All this, all this.

In the background, the mountains of Venezuela, seemingly within touching distance, and to the north, the Atlantic.

All this, all this.

And it seemed to me that at that moment Gardner believed that the boca, the rocks, the mountains behind them, the ocean, everything, all he could see, belonged to him.

Gardner allowed me to accompany him to the lighthouse one more time. He brought the cane with the prancing centaurs with him and a bag, which he slung over his shoulder. At the paved road he told me to stay behind, but I did not obey him. When I was sure he could not see me, I followed him. Near the lighthouse, I hid behind a tree. I saw him give something to the lighthouse keeper, money perhaps. They laughed and shook hands. Then the lighthouse keeper disappeared into his house. Moments later, he reappeared with a tackle box in his hand and headed in the opposite direction, down the path, not far from where I was hiding. When he turned the bend in the road, I walked around to where the lighthouse faced the sea and crouched in the bushes. I knew what Gardner would do. I had seen the glee on his face when he called into the wind:
All this. All this.
I looked up to the iron railing and waited. I didn’t have long to wait. I saw him crawl out of the tiny opening, his cape draped over his shoulders, his book and cane in his hands. I saw him lean forward against the railing. The wind rose under his cape. A wing. A bird. That was what he looked like to me: a giant bird of prey, unnatural in color, unnatural in its singular wing. A red corbeau, one-winged.