Prospero's Daughter (32 page)

Magic. This time it failed him. His cape, buoyed by the warm air, ballooned behind him, but in seconds gravity pulled him downward. His body struck the sharp edges of the rocks and broke into pieces. A wave gathered force, swelled high, and pushed toward the shore. It reached his body, pulled, sucked, and dragged him—head, torso, arms, and legs, his magical cape around him—deep into the Dragon’s Mouth.

My father’s contrition was hollow. He had no remorse for what he had done to Carlos or what he had done to Ariana. He believed that my life, the life of a person born of English parents—a white person—was worth more than Carlos’s life, the life of a black man, the life of a man in whose veins ran the blood of Africans. My life, the life of a white girl, was worth more that the life of a brown-skinned girl. In his perverse way he protected my virginity, but the virginity of a brown-skinned girl had no value for him. He would penetrate Ariana, but he would leave me intact. My father did not deserve my forgiveness.

“Why did he ask
you
?” Carlos asked me. “Why ask for
your
forgiveness?”

I was not ready to give him the answer.

As the boatman had predicted, it stormed the night my father flew over the cliff, below the lighthouse. In the eerie light from the lighthouse tower that arced across the dark waters, his body must have glinted, the phosphorous remains of a carcass caught in the narrow crevice of a rock. To La Remous he must have seemed already a ghost, the shadow of the dead that was not her business. But nothing would have distracted La Remous that night when lightning bolts sliced the black sky and thunder roared. She was riding the swollen waves in the driving rain, swirling the waters into her ferocious currents. She had no time for my father. He was debris on the rocks, and she was busy making a whirlpool in the center of the Boca. Four days later the Dragon spied my father in the crevice where he had spat him out. He lifted him up and pitched his mangled body on the craggy shore. Corbeaux circled above him.

We buried my father in the nuns’ cemetery, behind the old convent, near Marine Bay. The inspector had feared a scandal. He did not want my father’s body brought to Trinidad. The nuns pitied me:
Poor orphaned child. No mother, no father. No family anywhere in Trinidad.
No one told them my father’s death was a suicide. An accident, the inspector said.

I cannot say I rejoiced when my father killed himself. I felt that an injustice had been righted. My father had paid the price for the harm he had done to Carlos, the harm he had done to me, the harm he had done to Ariana. But at his funeral I found myself a child again, trailing behind my father on the beach at Cocorite. The wall I had built around my heart cracked, split open, and my tears flowed when the memories rushed through. The neck of my dress was soaked, plastered to my skin, when they lowered his body.

In the convent school in Port of Spain where the nuns arranged to send me, I learned the truth. I learned that my father was not thinking of me when he ran out of England, a man pursued. He was thinking of himself, desperate to save his skin. Afterward, after I learned this, nothing was left in my heart for my father, neither pity nor sorrow nor anger.

I spent one year in the convent school. Carlos remained on Chacachacare. The house was his again, the money my father stashed away from the sale of his mother’s jewelry his, too.

The inspector did not contest his claim. Independence was on the horizon, politics in the favor of people born here. Englishmen were returning home. By the following year they would lose another colony.

Carlos and I made a pact before I left for Trinidad. In one year I would come back. In one year we would marry.

In that one year I learned of my father’s history. The nuns, trying to find family for me, tracked down a man who said he had helped my father. He was a friend of a friend of my father’s brother. He was the one who had put my father and me on the boat to Chacachacare.

Had my father been so heartless? Had he really given a woman a drug he
had not tested?

My father had changed his name and yet still he feared discovery. Poor deluded Mrs. Burton. It was fear, not modesty, that had prevented my father from attaching his name to the white orchid. All that hypocritical talk about
Lycidas
he had poured into Carlos’s ears! My father was ambitious, greedy for praise and recognition. It was fame he was striving for in England.

Peter and Paul Bidwedder. One was as bad as the other.

TWENTY-FOUR

MY FATHER IS DEAD six years now. Four years ago, Carlos and I got married and I returned with him to Chacachacare. I had heard from Alfred. He wanted to apologize for leading me on. He said that at the time he came to my house, he already had a girlfriend. If he had not had a girlfriend, he would have been happy to date me. He swore he never would have taken advantage of my innocence. Father, it seems, had sent two letters by the boatman: one to the commissioner and the other to Alfred full of threats and warnings, cautioning him to be careful with my virtue, my purity. “You are lucky to have a father who protects you,” Alfred wrote. If only Alfred knew!

Inspector Mumsford came to see me during my year at the convent school in Trinidad. He was leaving for England and wanted to say good-bye. He asked about Carlos. I told him of our plans to marry. He was not happy for me. He said he had hoped I would return to England. Not that Carlos did not seem a good man, but we were different. “Them,” he said, throwing open his left hand. “Us,” he said, throwing open his right hand. “Kind should stay with kind.”

“Carlos is my kind,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“Carlos is human and I am human,” I said.

Othello and Desdemona. Was Shakespeare thinking of the prejudice of his day when he wrote their tragic story? It was no coincidence, Carlos said to me, that not long after Queen Elizabeth I issued a Royal Proclamation ordering the arrest and expulsion of “Negroes and black-mores,” Shakespeare told his story about a white woman in love with a Moor. It was fear that drove the queen to this extreme: too many English men and women marrying Africans. But love had its way. By the end of the eighteenth century there were half a million black people living in England.

I had not missed the shy smile that crossed Carlos’s face when he told me this. Nor did I forget that more than once he had commented that my mother’s sealed lips, in the photograph on my bureau, seemed to conceal a secret. Was that secret the lips themselves, full lips I had inherited, which, when they parted, made fishermen forget they wanted to burn candles?

The inspector scratched his head, perplexed. “It’s a new world,” he said. “I do not understand it.”

“A brave new world,” I countered.

In six months, Carlos and I will have our first child. It’s in a brave new world we hope to raise him, a world courageous enough to face the truth: We love with the heart for what is within, not outside, of us. Not for our superficial trappings. This truth had eluded the inspector and Father. Yet I do not know why Father had to be so cruel. Why did he have to torture Carlos?

“Why was Iago so evil?” Carlos responds when I struggle to puzzle out Father’s motive. “Racism needs no more incentive than the difference in the color of our skins.”

He had given Father the Miranda test, Carlos says, and Father had failed it. He believed no degree of education, no accumulation of knowledge, though surpassing his or that of any of his countrymen, would make a black man equal to an Englishman, would make him worthy of his daughter.

“What set him off?” I ask Carlos.

“One word,” he replies.
“People.”

But it was Father who was obsessed with my future progeny. Fear had brought him to a crisis. Fear had made him try to sell me to a stranger. Fear that if he could not find a way to stop himself, to put a barrier between his lascivious desires and me, it would be he who would be the father of my progeny.

There are nights I cannot sleep, worrying that a day could come when Carlos would shift my father’s sins from my father to me. “I am his daughter,” I remind Carlos.

He answers that he does not share my father’s twisted logic; he does not believe that my father’s blood, the color of my father’s skin, makes me who I am.

“But we owe you. Father owed you,” I say.

“I have what he stole from me. That is all I want,” he says. “I have my house.”

Would he have married me if he had not got back his house? Would he have wanted me to be the mother of his children if Father still occupied his house?

“I cannot change the fact that he was my father, but I am not English,” I say, needing reassurance.

And he responds: “Your skin is English.”

I do not pretend. I know my white skin gives me privileges. Doors would open for me if we lived in Trinidad. For my sake, the commissioner had promised to find Carlos a job, but we stay here on Chacachacare. Carlos is a poet. Like his father, the sea, the sun, the sky, the birds, all flora and fauna on the island are his inspiration. I do not want him to leave.

On our wedding day, the nuns presented us with the old boat they had used when they lived on the island. Carlos has repaired it. He has built a cabin in the middle of the boat with seats we can convert to a bed. Around the back and front of the cabin he has added benches. He has painted the boat yellow and white and named it after me.
The Virginia,
he calls it. Almost every day he ferries people back and forth from the mainland to their vacation homes on the other small islands. No one has built a vacation home on our island. They fear the lepers, the living ones and the dead.

I, too, am afraid of the lepers though I know that there is a cure and that the disease is not contagious. I was in Trinidad when the lepers helped Carlos rebuild the boat and dismantle many of the changes my father had made to the house and yard. One of the patients, a carpenter—an artist, Carlos says he is—restored the carvings of birds and flowers on the tops of the interior walls that my father had destroyed. When the sun shines through our house, it casts shadows of birds, hibiscus, roses, and lilies across our polished floors.

We have no need of the air conditioner. Carlos has installed fans with long wood blades on the ceilings, and when we turn them on, air flows from one room to the other through the spaces in the carvings in the walls.

We have kept many of Father’s flowers. Bougainvillea still blaze across the pillars on our front porch, orchids still climb the gray stumps of coconut tree trunks dug into graveled beds in our backyard. Under the shade of the greenhouse, we still grow anthuriums. But Carlos has restored the white orchids to the tree in the cove, where they belong.

We have fruit trees—mango, plum, grapefruit, orange, sapodilla, pomme cythere, chennettes. The chennette tree was the first Carlos planted, the first of the fruit trees my father had cut down. Every foot it grows, Carlos says, diminishes the memory of his pain.

Our lawn is different, too. It is not as green as my father’s grass, nor as sturdy. In the dry season it burns and turns a deep brown, but when it rains, it is green again.

Carlos earns a good income from overseas tourists who hire him to take them to the bigger islands: Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, some as far away as Antigua. I always go with him. I feel closer to Carlos on our boat, especially at night when the tourists are ashore. I lie with my head on his lap, the sea endless before us, the land behind us shadowed except for the flickering lights, and Carlos reads his poems to me. He says we remind him of his parents. Our love, he predicts, will be just as enduring.

I think I am the most fortunate woman in the world. I think our child will be the most fortunate child in the world.

Today, in the late afternoon, we sit on the porch watching the sun fan a fire across the horizon. Carlos has returned from the market in Trinidad. He has brought me mangoes. Julie, my favorite. He has planted three Julie mango trees in our yard. None so far has borne fruit. I believe him when he says they are awaiting our child. A present from nature, he tells me.

My fingers are yellowed with mango pulp; the skin around my mouth is wet and sticky. Mango peel falls to a basin at my feet. I reach for another. I tear away the skin with the edges of my teeth. I do not use a knife. Carlos laughs. “Like a true Trini,” he says to me.

A true Trini.
I laugh with him. Trinis—Trinidadians. That is what we call ourselves, though we also say we are Chacachacarians.

“Guess who I saw this morning near the market?” Carlos puts down the mango he is eating.

I guess right away. “Ariana,” I say.

“She’s a cadet in the police force,” he tells me.

I am pleased the matron has taken such good care of her. “She’s so brave,” I say. “If it wasn’t for her letter to the commissioner . . .”

Carlos takes my hand.

“She told him I love you,” I say.

He squeezes my hand. “And I love you more,” he says. We laugh. We have played this game before. He says he loves me and I answer, “I love you more.” He lets go of my hand and I ask, not suspecting that my question would lead me to tell him what I have been so afraid to reveal: “How does Ariana look?”

“Fat,” he says.

“Fat?”

“Well, not fat really. But you know how she used to be all skin and bones. Now she has some flesh on her.”

Skin and bones.
We avoid each other’s eyes when he says this. We both know why she was skin and bones. We had witnessed her withdrawal into herself, but I know better than Carlos why in the last year even eating seemed a chore for her.

I should tell him now, I say to myself. I am going to have his child. There should be no secrets between us. I have tried before. How many times have I wanted to give him the true answer to the question he had asked me when my father despaired, lost hope of being pardoned?

Why did he ask
you
to forgive him? Carlos had asked me. Why
you
?

Each time I begin to tell him the truth, each time the words bubble up to my lips, I swallow them. Mrs. Burton’s warning rings in my ears.
No man of distinction.
Would Carlos be like most men of distinction? I had heard the girls in my school whispering. After hours, when the maternity clinics are closed to the public, mothers bring their daughters. But nobody talks. Nobody exposes the fathers.

Shame keeps them silent, as my shame kept me silent, shame that should have been my father’s shame, but was not. Was not, except for those false seconds when he warbled his pathetic contrition under the cover of darkness, the truth inescapable before him. He would deny it in the light of day, demanding with a look,
never a word,
that I wipe my memory clean.

How easy it was for him to walk away, to forget or pretend to forget. To deposit his burden on me. But I lived in the body he had violated, the body he had plundered. I could not escape.

Carlos believes he has part of the answer to his question to me. He says my father did not ask for his forgiveness because my father did not believe he had done him any wrong. He says that my father expected his gratitude. He had fed him; he had educated him. “For his so-called kindness to me, he thought I should adore him, bow down to him. But it was
my
house. He met me here.” He quotes a line from
Hamlet,
Claudius’s desperate plea: “ ‘May one be pardoned and retain th’ offense?’ If he’d lived, he would have kept my house and my mother’s jewels.”

But
Why you?
continues to puzzle him. Why had my father asked for
my
forgiveness? Now I try to find a way to tell him.

“Ariana was unhappy here,” I say, thinking to start with Ariana. Thinking this route would lead me to myself.

“Yes.” He does not say more, but he has turned away from me, and I know if I could see his eyes and the curl I am certain his lips have formed, his face would reveal the disgust he feels.

She was only a child!
I have heard him repeat these words, sitting on the porch in the rocking chair, staring blankly into the night.

“And yet my father was so concerned about my virginity.” I move dangerously close to the heart of what I need to say.

He bends down and picks up a mango from the bunch he has laid on the floor. Slowly, shining its skin on the leg of his pants, a gesture that prepares me for words I am afraid I will hear (for he does not eat the mango skin; no one does), he says, “It’s the ones who preach the most about such things who are often the most guilty.”

A memory floods my being, Father answering me enigmatically:
She said you were my daughter.

Carlos continues to polish the mango. “Such men are always on the lookout for the slightest breach of modesty in their wives. Yet they want them to be whores in bed.”

My heart beats rapidly in my chest. “My father said my mother was the most virtuous woman he knew,” I say.

“He was probably the one who named you.”

Now,
I think.
Now.

“Do you think Ariana will marry?” I ask.

He puts down the mango. He is looking at me. “Why do you ask?”

I begin. “Because Father . . .” My voice falters. “Because Father . . .”

He stands up. His eyes have darkened and he presses his lips tightly together. I think he knows what I am about to say. I feel his love enfolding me, spreading roots beneath me, anchoring me.
He will hold me up.
I will not fall.

“Ariana was not the only one,” I murmur.

He comes over to where I am sitting. He gathers me in his arms. He understands. He knows. He takes me to his chair and puts me on his lap. I lean my head against his chest. I feel his breath moving in and out. I feel safe, I feel secure.

“Father made sure I did not lose my virginity,” I say. “But he took everything else.”

The baby kicks in my womb and turns. I move my hand instinctively to the place where my belly rolls: a gentle, undulating wave.

Carlos covers my hand with his.