Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez
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were more humiliating: Pets. No coloreds. But nothing stopped these sons and daughters of the Commonwealth. They came in droves from India, Pakistan, China, Africa, the West Indies, from every corner of the world where the sun set on lands the British had colonized, trusting in the propaganda of the Mother Country, believing in her gospel of fair play and justice. When asked, their response was naïve. Their oil, tobacco, cotton, sugar, bananas had made the Mother Country rich. Surely it was their turn.
The fear among the men was, naturally, the vulnerability of the women. What would happen if a colored man fucked a white woman? Mumsford and his school chums spent many an amusing hour making up answers—Stripes like a zebra, spots like a leopard. Freckles—all the time trying to smother hysteria.
Say something enough times and myth becomes fact, lies truth, Mumsford now admitted to himself. Carlos had freckles and the skin color of a colored man, but, as he grudgingly had to accede, the facial features of many an Englishman he knew: broad brow; thin lips; a wide, substantial chin; blue eyes undoubtedly inherited from his mother.
The blue eyes made Mumsford uneasy. They were disconcerting, strange to him on a brown face.
“Have you taken all you’ll need?” Carlos was standing in front of him, obviously ready to leave, but he had not uttered a single word. “Ready?” Mumsford jerked his head toward the black duffel bag he was holding.
The young man nodded, but his lips remained sealed.
He could not figure him out. He could not tell if he was afraid or relieved to be going with him. His eyes told him nothing. They were blank, empty of any expression Mumsford could discern. “Well then,” Mumsford said, when it was clear that Carlos would not answer him, “I’ll let Dr. Gardner know we are leaving.”
But before he could step forward, the front door opened and Gardner came running out, his shirttails flapping behind him. “See that he rots in jail,” he shouted to Mumsford.
Carlos made a gurgling sound and puckered his lips.
“Until his flesh rots.” Gardner had reached where they were standing.
What happened next so paralyzed both Mumsford and Gardner that neither man moved, stunned by the audacity of it, shocked by the intensity of the rage that had produced it. Had Mumsford been looking at Carlos at the time and seen his eyes narrow to slits and the venom pooled there, he might have anticipated it when he heard the gurgling coming from Carlos’s direction. But he was facing Gardner, and he saw what happened after it happened, after Carlos had done it.
He saw the stream of spit jetting forward, he saw it land with absolute accuracy on the tip of Gardner’s nose; he saw it slide and drain onto his top lip, and his feet, like Gardner’s, froze to the ground.
Carlos came close to Gardner. He was breathing hard; his nostrils flared. “You taught me your language well and I use it now to curse you. May you burn in hell, motherfucker!”
Gardner’s face lost color, and then his body thawed, and like a dog tucking its tail between its legs, he turned and walked away.
* * *
Mumsford had brought handcuffs, but he did not use them. After Carlos spat on Gardner’s face and cursed him, he seemed ready to leave, anxious even. “Can we go now?” he asked Mumsford. His voice was as cool as ice.
Why had Gardner not retaliated? Why hadn’t he struck him or insisted that Mumsford beat him with his baton? Why, when they faced each other, was Gardner the first to turn away? The conclusion Mumsford came to was the same one he had arrived at minutes before: Carlos had committed no real crime. The expression of his desire to have babies with Virginia was an insult to Gardner, no more. Still, to spit in the face of an Englishman!
“That was disrespectful.” He said so to Carlos.
“He deserved it.” Carlos’s breathing had slowed. He spoke without emotion, as if merely stating an obvious fact.
And perhaps it was an obvious fact. The boy had been tortured. It had irked Mumsford when the commissioner had told him to take Carlos to the monks. Jail, he thought, would have been more appropriate for the perpetrator of a crime against an English girl. But he was grateful now for the commissioner’s insistence, now after he had witnessed Gardner’s cruelty.
“I’m not taking you to jail,” he said, wanting to put the boy at ease. “The commissioner has asked me to bring you to the monks at St. Benedict’s.”
The young man remained stubbornly silent, but Mumsford saw the muscles on the side of his face loosen and his jaw relax.
“There will be no more punishment, Codrington.”
He wanted to say more to him, but decided it would be imprudent. The fact remained that the investigation was not yet over. He had yet to speak to Virginia, to get her side of the story.
The boatman was waiting at the spot where he said he would be. The moment he saw Carlos, he came quickly toward him. “Is good you leaving, Mister Carlos,” he said. He grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously.
Mumsford frowned at him, unsettled by the honorific. Mister?
The boatman paid no attention to his frown. “You lead the way, Mister Carlos,” he said.
Carlos smiled and walked in front of him. Mumsford had no choice but to follow, and the boatman picked up the rear.
No one spoke on the brief walk to the water, the silence broken only by the swish of branches, the call of birds, the occasional pebble rolling downhill. Once a twig snapped and then another, rapidly, behind it. Mumsford turned around sharply. “Iguana,” the boatman said. “Plenty in the bush.” But when they neared the clearing, Mumsford saw the unmistakable flicker of yellow between the greens and browns in the bushes.
Ariana!
He told the boatman to wait in the boat with Carlos and he went to the place where he had seen the yellow. Ariana parted the branches and appeared before him.
“I tell you a lot about Carlos and Miss Virginia but not now. I can’t stay.” She held up her hand.
Mumsford brushed aside the flicker of irritation that flashed through him and concentrated. “Can you come to the station?” he asked.
“I come tomorrow. Tomorrow is Friday. He study on Friday; read he books all day. I come ten o’clock.”
“Ten o’clock is fine. But won’t he miss you?”
“Prospero miss nobody when he read his books.”
It was not the time to ask the question, but Mumsford could not help himself. “Why do you call him Prospero?” he asked.
She shrugged. “He prosperous. He rich.”
“So that is it?”
“Ask Carlos. If it have another reason, Carlos know. Is he who give him the name.”
But it made no sense to ask Carlos then or during the sea crossing to Trinidad. It was clear he was determined not to speak, to remain in stony silence no matter what was said to him. When he did speak, as he was getting off the boat in Trinidad, it was to utter only four short sentences. He said them not to Mumsford and not to the boatman, either. It was as if he were speaking to himself, having felt a need to hear his own voice.
“My mother,” he said, “was blue-eyed, but she was not a hag. She was beautiful. The house was hers. He stole it from me.”
FOUR
PETER GARDNER, as Mumsford could have surmised from his cagey answers, had not come for the lepers. He did not stay because of them. He would never have chosen this hellhole to raise his daughter. If he were forced to tell the truth, he would have said it was his innocence that had brought him here. His naïveté. His trust sans bounds and confidence in a brother who, next to his daughter, of all the world he loved. A brother who had clung to him like ivy but only to suck him dry.