Prospero's Daughter (23 page)

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. I did not know what I meant when I said that. What could I say to him? What could I tell him that would dissuade him from a plan he had fixed for her?

“I’ll tell him,” I said, my mouth in her hair. “I’ll tell him I love you.”

She disentangled herself from my arms and pushed her hands with such force against my chest, I had to step back to balance myself. “He will kill you,” she said. Her lips were ash white, the blood drained from her face. I pulled her back in my arms. “Don’t.” Her voice came muffled against my shirt. “Not a word. Not a word to him. Promise me, Carlos.”

I glanced over to Ariana. Her hand was clasped over her mouth, and her eyes darted from me to the kitchen door. “I tell you when he coming,” she said.

I led Virginia to the drawing room and eased her down on the sofa with me. I had to save her, save myself.

“He has made up his mind,” she said. “He will not change it.”

“And what about you? What about us?”

“He will not allow it.” She held my face between the palms of her hands and drew me to her.

I felt Ariana’s hand on my arm. “Let her go,” she said. “Come.” She beckoned Virginia. “Is time. I help you pack. Is better this way.”

Gardner was in a good mood when he returned. He bounded up the front steps, clapping his hands and shouting for Virginia. “Virginia! Good news, Virginia!” Ariana met him in the drawing room. “Have you packed her yet?” he asked her.

“We almost done,” she said.

“Then finish, finish. They love her. Do you hear me, Ariana? They love her. Mrs. Burton said the boy is smitten with her.”

One day, one visit. It seemed that was all it took. And yet I knew the American hardly looked at her.

He knocked on Virginia’s door. “He’s smitten. Freddie’s smitten.” But Virginia did not open her door. He knocked again and when she did not answer, he said in a loud voice to no one in particular, “She’s shy. She’ll come around.” Nothing, it seemed, was going to dampen his spirits. He popped his head in the kitchen and told me to meet him in the greenhouse. “He’s in love,” he said. He did not wait for my response.

How was I going to tell him I was in love with her? What would he do when I told him? Of all the possibilities before me, the one I never considered was the one Virginia predicted: I did not think he would kill me.

His plans for Virginia were still on his mind when I came to the greenhouse dressed in my khaki gardener’s uniform. I had never seen him so excited.

“There’s to be a party soon,” he said. His eyes were shining and the corners of his mouth twitched in his effort to suppress a smile.

He had changed his clothes. When Mrs. Burton was here, he had worn the same white shirt he had put on for the Americans, which Ariana had bleached in the sun and starched according to his instructions. But now he was in his dusty gardener’s khaki pants and rumpled shirt, an old man, a simple gardener, though he thought a scientist in a botanical lab.

“I’ve given Mrs. Burton money to have a dress made for her,” he said. He tightened the knot on his ponytail. “Just a few orchids, that’s all it cost me.”

I wanted to say that perhaps a dress was worth a few orchids, but not her. I wanted to say that she would be unhappy with this Freddie, this Ferdie. She belonged here, not there, not in America, a place she did not know, with people she did not know.

He sent me to fetch the pots of chaconia. He had pulled up the chaconia bush when he was cutting down the trees in my backyard, but one plant had survived. He would have destroyed it, too, if Lucinda had not given him her name for it. Wild poinsettia, she called it. Its mass of scarlet-red petals blossomed in clusters, mounted at the tips of stems sprouting elegant long, flat, dark green leaves. He would find a way to double the petals, he told her. Now he wanted to triple them. “Getting there, getting there,” he said when I brought him the plants. He was pleased with himself. Exhilarated.

I was trying to figure out how to begin, where would be the best way to start.

He clipped off the top of one of the plants and held up the cutting. “This,” he said, “is a hybrid of a hybrid. Nothing like it. Nothing like what I am going to make with it.”

And suddenly it came to me. Suddenly I knew how I would trap him.

“The flowers get prettier the more you mix them,” I said.

He grinned at me. “That’s the secret. Mix them, graft them.” He reached for another plant, sliced six inches from the top, and took both cuttings to his worktable. I knew the routine. I handed him a lump of moss he had sprayed with his secret solution, a piece of plastic wrapping paper, and twine. He switched the cuttings and attached a clipping from one plant to the other plant, wrapped the moss around it, and secured it with the plastic and twine. “Good,” he said, and slapped his hands together. A puff of light dust rose in the air. “Now for the hibiscus.” He had tamed the wild hibiscus bush he had found on the island. It was a thick shrub now that lined the back of the greenhouse and bloomed all year round, but he was still experimenting. “Next year the flowers will be bigger and prettier,” he said, when I gave him one of the pots of hibiscus plants he had forced into dwarfs.

“Is it the same with humans?” I asked.

“Humans?” He eyed me suspiciously.

“Can you make them prettier if you graft them?”

I think I was so invisible to him that the thought did not occur to him that I might be speaking of myself, of myself and his daughter. He continued to frown at me for a second more, and then he laughed out loud, a dry, mirthless laugh. “You should have seen the things I did in England,” he said. He clipped a flower and shook the yellow pollen on a white piece of paper.

“With humans?”

“Yes, indeed, with humans, my boy.” He sounded proud of his achievement. “Would have cured their diseases,” he said.

I flattered him. “I know you would have,” I said.

“But they were skittish, my boy. Wouldn’t let me.” He shook the pollen of one plant onto the stamen of the other.

“Could you grow parts?”

I seemed to have startled him with that question. He stopped what he was doing. “Parts?” He fixed his eyes on me.

“A good part to replace a bad part. Like grow a finger if someone had lost a finger,” I said.

I did not know how close I had come to his history. “Grow a finger?” He narrowed his eyes at me.

“Or liver. If you could do that, you could cure any disease.” It was disease he was fighting when he cut and grafted, when he chopped down the fruit trees my father had planted. “You said that was what you were trying to do in England,” I said.

He seemed to have realized that I could not have known more. The tension in his face eased. “Yes, yes,” he said. “That was what I was trying to do.” He bent over the plant and plucked off the dead leaves.

“You could have helped the czar,” I said.

“Ah, the Romanovs.”

I was closing in on him. I knew I pleased him with my reference to the Romanovs. He liked when I spoke of historical events in Europe. They were tangible evidence, proof of the success of his experiment in civilizing me.

“Alexis,” I said, keeping my voice even. “You could have cured him.”

“Hemophilia,” he said.

“But if they had intermarried . . .” I left the rest of the sentence hanging.

He cut another flower. “You have to be careful,” he said, brushing off the pollen. “You have to get it all.”

“But if they had intermarried.” I forced him back to the place where I wanted him.

He shook his head. “That was not possible, my boy.” He picked up the paper with the pollen. “Blue blood, you know, must stay with blue blood.”

“But wouldn’t the disease have regressed?”

“Yes. That’s possible.” He emptied the pollen carefully into the centers of the flowers on a row of other plants. “Regressed,” he said. “In time, disappeared.”

“All diseases, in fact, could be cured that way.”

“What way?” He was still concentrating on the flowers.

“By intermarriage.”

He straightened up. “Intermarriage?” His eyes were nuggets of steel.

“If an African who carried the sickle cell anemia gene married a European who had the gene for cystic fibrosis, isn’t it possible that none of their children would get either disease?”

“Who’s been telling you that, my boy?” The paper he was holding fluttered in his hand. Pollen drifted to the ground, gold dust sprinkling the brown earth.

“I read it in your books,” I said, not backing down.

He brought his face close to mine. “There can be no improvement of the white race from a marriage with the black race.” I smelled his breath. It was sour. Acidic.

“You said I was better than my mother.” I reeled him in. All that was left now was to plunge my fingers deep in his gills.

“Your mother was a fool.”

“My mother was married to a black man.”

“Your mother was a fool for lying down with a black man.” The vein in his forehead bulged thick and blue.

“He was my father.” I could feel my blood pulsating in my neck. “You live in his house. You live in a black man’s house.”

He was breathing hard, sucking in air like a donkey. “Liar!”

“
My
house. You stole it from me.”

“Liar! Ingrate!” He grabbed me by the collar of my shirt. But I was ready. I reached around my neck and held his wrist. I squeezed it hard until his hand grew limp. He let go and we faced each other, panting.

“I curse the day I lodged you.” He bared his teeth, a dog snarling.

“You,”
I said. I held his eyes. “
You
curse the day, but not Virginia.”

It took a second for my words to sink in, so accustomed was he to excluding me, to thinking of me as inferior to him, inferior to Virginia, not quite a man as Englishmen were men, not quite human as Englishmen were human. And then he understood.
But not Virginia.

“You filthy bastard. You vile savage, you born devil.” His eyes were fiery balls blazing beneath his wrinkled forehead. A fine film of dirt had collected on the sweat pearled on his top lip. Spittle dribbled down his chin. “I will kill you. I will kill you if you even try. ”

I lashed out: “ ‘Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans.’ ”

Caliban’s words. And yet what I meant to say to him was that I loved her. That one day I hoped to marry her, to have children with her. But the world had grown dark when he hurled that string of epithets at me. There was no light for me to see.

He lunged for me. I stepped aside and tripped him. He fell on his knees. I pushed him farther down, face forward in the dirt with my heel.

It was over. We had come to the end.

Why hadn’t I left before? Why had I stayed so many years? Why hadn’t I fought him for my house and my land? My reasons, when those questions troubled my mind, were always the same. I had no papers, I had no proof. There was no deed. It was my mother’s house: That alone was my evidence. As long as the British ruled, an Englishman’s lies would trump my truth.

But it was
my
house and
my
land, and I would not leave him here with my house and my land.

Yet gratitude, too, bound me to him. He had taught me more than I would ever have known. He had brought the world to me on Chacachacare.

And there was habit, the sick love that comes from habit. I had lived with him twelve years on this desolate island. How was it possible for me not to have formed an attachment to him, even if merely of the sort one would have for a pet that licked one’s hand? I have heard of couples who stay married in spite of the abuse they have inflicted on each other. A woman comes to the police with a broken hand, her face bloodied, her nose smashed, her eyes swollen, and in the end she begs for the release of her batterer. Habit? We are creatures who serve that demon. Change terrifies us. There were times I hated him, but hate is not possible without love. Hate is the ashes, the dying embers of love. Hate is not indifference.

SEVENTEEN

BUT HE IMPRISONED ME. I had knocked him down. I could have done it again. I was in the full vigor of my youth. He was thin and sinewy, a middle-aged man dried out by the sun. Yet that was how Inspector Mumsford found me: surrounded by barbed wire, penned up in the backyard, accused of attempting to rape Virginia.

This is what I remember. I remember seeing him on his knees, his face covered with dirt. I remember feeling no emotion for him, neither hate nor love. I was indifferent, my heart a blank slate, all my anger and resentment toward him erased, all the affection that had made it possible for me to endure his insults, his abuse, his casual derision of the fading memories of my mother and father.

I had found myself in his music, in his literature, and thought of his art as my art, belonging also to me, but there was nothing in common between us now. Nothing to stir me to pity when he looked up, hurt and disbelief, not anger, stinging his eyes to water. For he had betrayed art. Art—music and literature (not the artist)—had been my guide to beauty and truth, to what was good, to what was morally reprehensible. He had misused art, subverted it to suit his vanity.

I walked away. I turned my back on him. I did not look back.

Inside the house, I threw myself on my bed. I had done what I had every reason to do, was justified in doing, not just then but years before. The strain left me limp, a rag doll, its innards stuffed with straw. My eyelids dropped heavily over my eyes and a sleep descended on me so thick, so deep, I did not hear him, I did not sense him, not until he plunged a syringe filled with his vile drug deep in my thigh and set my bones on fire.

I bolted upright. Too late. He was standing by my bedside, his lips snatched back high on his gums, his teeth like fangs, gleaming. I strained to reach for him, but a dense fog rolled over me. Through it, the pharmacist’s face, wrinkled with worry, shimmered toward me. Paralysis mounted my legs and spread up my entire body, a wave washing inexorably across dry sand. Before darkness engulfed me I achieved a clarity that hubris had denied me. I had bullied the pharmacist. Now with the same poison, Gardner had drugged me.

I was not conscious when Gardner pulled me off the bed and dragged me to the backyard. I did not hear when he pounded nails into the fence he built around me. Only once did my brain break through the fog that enveloped it. He was chanting, words that rose and fell in lugubrious rhythms. They penetrated a place where I had stored a memory: my mother’s burning bed; he, a horse prancing, his cape iridescent. I must have said something. What, I do not remember. My lips moved—
that
I remember—and he plunged the needle in my thigh again.

The sun was blazing down on me when I regained consciousness. He had stripped me to my underpants. Pain seared across every inch of my body as though a million needles had been dug and then twisted viciously into me. Blood had clotted in spots over my naked torso and over my face, my arms, my legs. Where the sores were fresh, the blood oozed, and in its tracks, mosquitoes, glutted, too fat to fly, slipped and staggered like drunks.

The stench of shit burned my lungs. Vomit rose up my throat. I forced it back. I had to wait for him; I had to steel myself.

Then I saw him. He was walking toward me, bouncing a pail of water back and forth in his hand, grinning merrily. My head throbbed, but I knew what I had to do. He had cursed my mother. He had commanded graves to open and wake their sleepers. I knew how to make him afraid of me.
Obeah,
he had sneered when we heard the drums beat in the night from the other side of our bay, where the leper colony began.
Devil worship.
And yet his were the very words that passed through my mind when I chanced to see him in the afternoons walking up and down between the rows of seedlings he had planted in the mounds next to the greenhouse, at the edge of the lawn.
Obeah. Devil
worship,
I thought, watching him in his velvet cape shake his cane over the seedlings and mumble words he read from his red leather-bound book.

He was close to the fence now and I summoned up my strength, what little I had remaining. “You will never rest,” I said. I spoke slowly and deliberately. “You will never find peace in your life.” The words whistled malignantly through my clenched teeth. “You will rot like a leper, you will die in shame, without a cent, without a farthing to your name.”

His arm twitched and his hand jerked forward. Water spilled out of the pail and splashed on his leg. I did not stop. “You cursed my mother. I curse you in the name of my mother.”

His head had moved downward automatically when the water wet his leg. It had taken no effort on his part, no courage, to look away, but freed from my eyes, he recovered.

He would make me like a honeycomb to bees, he said. The mosquitoes will pinch and sting me until sores and blisters covered every pore of my body. I was a rapist.
A would-be rapist.

Even in his rage he would remember he was English, his daughter was English.
Would-be,
he remembered to say.

“Your vile race is of such a nature that nurture can never stick.” He flung the words out at me.

I let him rant on.

He regretted all he had ever done for me. He was a fool to think he could change me.

But he was afraid of me. His experiment had succeeded beyond his imagining. His real fear, I knew, was that his daughter could choose me.

For two days, until Inspector Mumsford rescued me, I suffered in silence. I knew he wanted me to beg for his mercy, to cry out when the sun baked the sores where the mosquitoes had settled in hordes to bleed me, but I gave him no satisfaction.

“I must eat my dinner.” That was all I said, the only consolation he got from me.

Now I sat in the room that the monk had given me. My sores were still raw, my body still racked with pain. How I wished I had said to Gardner what I said to that poor, foolish monk. How I wished I had defied him years ago. How I wished I had let him pick up the poisonous berry from the manchineel tree that day I took him to the lighthouse. I could have split it open, rubbed the juices on his hand. I could have tricked him into biting it.

For the first time in my life I felt free, in control of my thoughts. For the first time I could say without hesitation that I was seeing the world on my terms, not on his terms, not through eyes that had determined that I was inferior, that had marked me, even before I was born, as less than, as incapable of being, the man he thought himself and all white men to be.

That monk was praying for me now. It would be no use. I had stayed in Dr. Gardner’s garden too long. I was my own man now.

I undressed. I took off my pants and hung them up. Something dropped out of my pocket. A piece of paper, folded in two. I unfolded it. A letter from Virginia.

My dearest Carlos,

It breaks my heart to think what Father has done to you. He told me he intends to hand you over to the commissioner. He said you tried to rape me while I was sleeping. I told him it’s a lie, but he will not listen to me.

What did you say to Father?

Do not lose hope. I will tell the commissioner the truth.

I love you.

Virginia

Dearest Virginia. Before I fell asleep, I had read her last words ten times.
I love you.
In my dreams I breathed them back to her in her ear.