For nights I could not sleep, terrified that I could contract her disease. I had worn the ribbons she had returned; I had breathed in the scent of the flowers she had touched. Unable to put my fears out of my mind, I told Carlos what I had done.
“You can’t get leprosy by touching someone’s clothing,” he assured me. “Don’t worry about the ribbons.”
But I felt guilty. And I missed her. Only my deepening friendship with Carlos eased my longing to see her again. Now I lived for those hours when Father went to his garden and I had Carlos to myself. Ariana alone spoiled my happiness then, though I did my best to ignore her. I could not help but hear the sighs that came, sometimes in rolling waves, from the kitchen where she sat. But Ariana had always seemed morose to me. I used to think it was because her mother was dead, but my mother was also dead. Ariana was more fortunate than I. I would have preferred to have known my mother even if for a short time. That would have been better than not to have known her at all. I said so to Ariana and she replied that at least my mother had not abandoned me. “Your mother did not
want
to die,” I said to her. “She did not
want
to leave you.” And she answered, “She should have find some place to leave me then. Not here on this godforsaken island.”
I thought she was happy living in the house with us. I thought she liked Father. I thought she wanted to please him. “The food the way you like it, sir?” she would ask him as she cleared the table. The slightest praise from Father seemed to brighten her eyes.
I used to think Father made her feel important when he called her to his room after lunch. She would announce what we would eat the next day as if the decision were hers, and she would make poor Carlos wash the dishes for her and mop the floor. I thought she liked me, too. When I was a child she seemed happy to play games with me when Father went in the garden and left her to entertain me.
I thought the reason she began to resent me was that I had told Father that Carlos could read. It was my fault, she seemed to believe, that Father no longer required Carlos to help her in the kitchen. I became a burden to her after that. She began to see herself as Father had defined her: my servant, my nanny at my beck and call, his eyes when he could not be with me. So I convinced myself that I was doing her a favor, giving her long hours to do whatever she wanted while I sat in the drawing room with Carlos.
Yet it became more and more difficult for me to turn a blind eye to the gloom that seemed to have settled over her. Permanently, it appeared to me. She would sit in the same spot in the kitchen while Carlos and I talked and laughed in the drawing room. From time to time, she would sigh or glance up at us with a vacant expression in her eyes. On our afternoon walks now, she barely said a word to me. Even with the fisherman, she was strangely subdued. No more did she complain about the fish he brought her. When he teased her, she looked away from him, her eyes drifting aimlessly across the bay. Nothing he could say—about her hair, her eyes, her arms—could nudge her into her usual response. It was as if he had become a stranger to her. She paid for the fish and let his teasing wash over her.
Worried, the fisherman asked her if she was not well. “Mind your own business,” she said. There was no snap of anger in her tone, only a deadening dismissal of his concern for her.
“The Tobago love is over,” Carlos said.
Tobago love.
Tobago, on the northwestern coast of Trinidad, was the most populated of the islands annexed to it, the butt of jokes about its smallness and the supposedly futile ambition of its people to imitate the sophistication of Trinidadians. Ariana liked the attention the fisherman was giving her, Carlos explained. She just didn’t know how to accept his compliments.
Perhaps Carlos was right, but I thought there had to be a bigger reason for the change in Ariana. There were times I came upon her sitting in the kitchen, her eyes downcast, twirling a strand of her thick, black hair absentmindedly around her fingers. She seemed to be in another world, a world miles away from where we were. And yet I never inquired. I never asked her if there was something I could do to help her.
I preserved him, Father said. I was soon to discover that Ariana preserved me from him.
TWENTY-ONE
THE FIRST TIME Father came to my room, I had just turned fifteen. I was sleeping. I thought I was dreaming. Something was stuck in my throat and I could not get it out. But I was not dreaming. Something was stuck in my throat. I gagged and it sank in deeper. I gagged again and tried to get up, but a great weight pressed down on me and I could not budge. I flailed my arms. It held me down.
I saw skin.
I saw hair.
Then it was over.
Father was sitting at the side of my bed, his head buried in his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He said the words again and again. Tears were in his eyes.
“Humankind,” says T. S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” I am human; I, too, cannot bear very much reality. I need my dreams, my illusions, my fantasies. I lose part of myself when I glimpse back to that first time when Father violated me, the self I need to believe is lovable, is good, is pure. The self I need to believe was not soiled, was not defiled. The self I fantasize had a girlhood like the girlhood of those innocent girls, those pretty women, in the stories I read. This fantasy keeps me steady; it holds me back from tumbling down the tunnel of despair from which I fear I may never return.
I loved my father. Even now I want to love my father. Isn’t that the wish of every daughter? Who wants to know, who wants to believe, that the flesh and blood that gave life to her flesh and blood would wish to ruin her?
I know with my reason that Father crossed a line no loving father would cross. I know with my heart that Father loved me. These two truths exist side by side, one unbearable, the other making it possible for me to hope, to believe I can be loved.
My reason urges me to expose him, to reveal to the last detail all he had done to me. He with his books and his learning; he with his pale skin, his books, and his learning, presuming himself superior to Carlos.
He can read. The little savage can read.
I had heard him clearly that day I proved to him that Carlos could read. I had not forgotten.
Who was the savage now? Who, in spite of his learning, had transgressed that universal taboo embedded in the souls of all of us who call ourselves human?
I am afraid to recall the sounds, the grunts Father made that stopped up my ears. I am afraid to recall the smells, the musky odor of sweat and semen. I am afraid to recall the touch, a father’s body on his daughter’s. I tell what I can tell, what I can bear to tell.
Father made me a promise. “It won’t happen again,” he said.
Five times. That is the number, the numeral for the actual times that it happened again. One million, eight hundred, fourteen thousand, four hundred. That is the number, the true times it happened to me again. For there was not a second in those three weeks before Father wrote to Mrs. Burton, afraid of what more he might do, that I could build a dam strong enough against the raging force of memories, insistent that I feel all over again his hardened flesh in my mouth, his fingers in my hair, leeches drawing blood.
The next time he bruised my lips. I twisted my head to the right; I twisted it to the left. He twisted it back again, fingers in my hair.
When he was finished, he pleaded for my pity. “Look at what I have become,” he said. “My child, my own child.”
My child. My own child.
The third time, he wanted my compassion. “I have no friends, no family, no one who looks like me. Only you. I get so lonely.”
The fourth time, long after he was gone, a bone, the ghost of a bone, lingered in my throat. Ariana caught me looking for it. “Here.” She handed me a jar of honey. Shame, like molten tar, coursed through my body, burning me up.
“It make you feel better,” she said. “I know he do it to you, too.”
I could barely speak. “Too?” I asked her.
“What you think he do with me when he call me in he room after lunch?” she said.
“Since when?”
“Since I was nine,” she said.
Bile stung my throat and I coughed to push it down.
She handed me a towel. “I want to throw up, too,” she said. I pressed the towel against my lips. I swallowed hard.
“Since you turn woman, he do it to me worse because is you he want, not me.”
Did he put it in your mouth?
I must have asked the question for I heard her say, “Not only there. It don’t matter to him I not a virgin. I black. He say you still a virgin.”
My jewel was in my dower; my virgin knot was unbroken. That was what mattered to Father.
Did Father fear that he would cease to exist, that he would no longer be who he deceived himself to be if Ariana was not who he defined her to be? Was it so essential to this deception that I, his English rose, remain untouched, her jewel safe in her dower? Was Father’s construction of his worth so dependent on his construction of the lack of worth of people whose skin color was darker than his?
Father said Ariana and her kind were primitive. He meant no malice, he told me. And I used to think
primitive
was a kinder word than
savage.
Primitive people, Father said, were like children. They gave no thought to the consequences of their actions. They did what they wanted to do because it pleased them to do it when they did it. But we were civilized.
We
white people,
we
English people, used reason to control our desires. If this was true, Father had become too civilized, his desires so controlled, so repressed, that like a boil rounded and glistening with pus, his desires had grown ripe. Freed from the eyes that could have restrained him in England, Father lanced his boil and it spewed out the years of obscenities he had hoarded, defiling Ariana, defiling me.
The morning of the fifth and last time Father came to my room, he left lesions in my mouth. This time he placed the blame on me. He could not help himself, he said. I reminded him of my mother. “Such beautiful hair, such beautiful eyes.” He stroked my neck. I tore away his hand.
It didn’t take much to convince Carlos that all I suffered from was a sore throat. But Father knew better. Terrified that the fifth time might not be the last time, he reached out for salvation to Mrs. Burton.
TWENTY-TWO
I BARELY NOTICED the crossing by sea. Yet there had been days, standing at the edge of the bay, I could not move though Ariana stamped her feet and shouted my name threatening to leave me, so entranced was I by the tiny ripples across the silken water, the shimmering reflection of greens and browns from trees overshadowing the bay. Now on the boat on my way to Mrs. Burton’s I was blind to all that beauty. Now questions consumed me: What would the police do to Carlos? What could I say to save him?
“Tell them about you,” Ariana urged me. Did I dare, though Father had abused me?
I had liked Carlos from the first day I saw him. Loved him before he knew. Twelve years, not five or six,
twelve
years we had lived together on this isolated island, our only neighbors, the lepers, bound together by their infirmities and keeping their distance from us and we from them. What boy or girl would not have clung to each other?
My childish self had said the words when Carlos saved a dying bird for me, but now the words had meaning: I loved him. All those afternoons sitting next to him in the drawing room. All those afternoons listening to his stories, pretending to pay attention to the lessons he wanted to teach me, and most of the time watching the slope of his chin, tracing the lines of his lips, his broad brow, his wide chin, finding the reflection of my eyes in his. How could he think I would consider marrying Alfred?
It was Father, not I, who believed that the color of Alfred’s skin would make Alfred more attractive to me. A child does not think less of another child because the color of that child’s skin is different from hers. Adults are the ones who plant the disease; adults are the ones who nurture it.
Malicious slave.
I burned with anger when Father spat out those words as I walked next to him on the way to the boat that was waiting for me. Carlos had made me understand that slavery was a crime against humanity. Did Father believe that Carlos was less than human; that Alfred, but not Carlos, was human?
Guilt-thickened tongues, stopped-up vocal cords when Fanny Price asked Sir Bertram about the slave trade. I had read feverishly to the end of
Mansfield Park,
hoping to find evidence of their remorse. But though Sir Bertram was ready to admit his mistakes in raising his daughters, not a word of repentance crossed his lips. And yet he had made his fortune trading human flesh. And yet he had purchased and furnished Mansfield Park with money steeped in human blood. Was his conscience not stirred because he believed the Africans he enslaved were less than human? Was Father’s conscience not stirred because he believed Carlos was less than human?
Mrs. Burton had arranged for a car to meet me at the Yacht Club. When the driver opened the back door, I slid inside, barely managing to thank him. My fears for Carlos still hounded me, questions bombarding me that I had no answers for. I clutched the clay pot with the orchid for Mrs. Burton close to my chest and lowered my head. I must have been a pitiful sight, for the driver turned to me and said, “Not to worry, miss. I get you there in an hour.” He had misread my silence, but it was then, when I raised my head to answer him, that I saw the world Carlos had described to me.
The sun had risen only a sliver above the horizon when we left Chacachacare, and in the dim light, the trees and the sea seemed covered by a veil, gray though translucent. Now, an hour later, the forested hills on the left side of the road were flecked with gold, and on the right, where the land dropped sharply, the sea was dazzling. Half-naked fishermen, their brown torsos glistening in the sunlight, their legs spread wide apart, balanced themselves on the bows of colorful pirogues and threw huge nets overboard that sent long sprays of water in the air that sparkled like diamonds.
I had imagined all this. I had reconstructed this world, made paintings in my mind with the words Carlos had given me, but what I saw before me was a thousand times better. I sat up in the car, breathless now with anticipation. I knew what was to come, and yet when we reached it, the surprise was fresh. The bauxite factory: intricate nests of pink bridges and funnels, pink towers rising above them, and below, pipes pouring rivers of pink dust into ships, larger than houses, anchored in the harbor below. Guiana, its coastline choked with mud from the delta of the Orinoco River, had sent its bauxite on flatbed boats here to be exported from the deep waters in Trinidad. Even the trees were covered with pink dust—lethal for the people, I know now—but the factory seemed a giant dollhouse to me then, and everything around it a pink wonderland.
We drove past the fishing village of Cocorite, where policemen on horseback had rounded up the first waves of people sick with leprosy and shipped them to our island. There was a story about a group of Indians who had managed to escape. A boatload of them drowned on their way back to India. I, too, would have been on that boat. I, too, would have preferred to take my chances than to be pried from my family, huddled and roped like cattle to the market. Now I saw Indians, Africans, douglas—people mixed with Indian and African blood— standing in front of wooden shacks that tumbled upon each other on the land side of the narrow, winding road, opposite the sea. Not so many would have survived had the sick ones not been sent to Chacachacare.
We passed another village. Under the rusty awnings of broken-down shops, men in sleeveless vests sat around weather-beaten tables drinking rum. On the seaside, more men, but these pulled in seines from the sea while women, holding empty basins, waited for them under sea-almond trees.
For fish. It was here I had come that first time.
I remembered the fishermen who had followed me. Under my chest, tiny muscles fluttered like the beating of butterfly wings. A distant memory. A photograph. I hardly had time to savor it before we left the village behind and before us loomed a grand cream-colored manor house as if lifted out of a Victorian novel.
“The Poor House,” the driver said, and deflated my hopes. “You wouldn’t want to go there, miss. It smells.”
I craned my neck backward and peered through the rear window. A scattering of people in ragged clothes, some so thin they looked like crooked sticks, were huddled at the black, imposing iron gates.
“They waiting for they breakfast,” the driver said. “We in St. James now.”
When I faced forward the scene had changed. People everywhere: Chinese, Indians, Africans. Europeans who looked like me. They were laughing, shouting, hands gesticulating in the air. The car slowed down with the traffic, and I breathed in the sweet perfume of overripe fruit and the pungent odor of fried fish and curry that came from open stalls in front of shops and stores that lined the street. I saw a church and then a temple.
“The temple for the Hindus,” the driver said when I asked.
The road widened into a circle. On the right was a cinema, a huge white building with columns and balconies, Roxy spelled out in bright red letters. We rounded the circle and veered off to a road on the left of a small, triangular savannah. On the opposite side, running parallel to the savannah, was another road, and along it a stretch of houses followed by a long, high wall. “The back of the Oval,” the driver said. “Is there the West Indian team give the English a licking. Teach them a lesson.”
I had listened to that cricket match on the radio with Father and Carlos. When England lost, Father snapped off the dial.
I could not see enough, I could not hear enough. But my excitement was not to last.
“Did you notice when we pass the police barracks?” the driver asked.
My anxiety returned.
The police. Did he know about Carlos?
I had seen the sign; I had not missed the palm trees, the bottoms of their trunks stained with whitewash, three feet high. Like sentinels, they lined sides of a great lawn, guarding the path that led to a long green-and-white building sprawled out in the background. My eyes had seen this, but my brain refused to process what it knew, preferring instead the marquee at the Roxy.
“My brother train there in the barracks,” the driver said.
That was all he wanted me to know, but my mood had shifted as we turned into another street and I was thinking of Carlos again, fearing for his safety.
“We nearing Mrs. Burton’s house,” the driver said. “Ellerslie Park. Is where your people live.”
He meant white people. Even before I saw the grand houses with the manicured lawns and the flowers blooming in the well-tended beds, I knew we had arrived where the rich people lived. The quiet here was a sharp contrast to the bustle of St. James, the only sounds the rustle of leaves on the trees and the occasional whistle of a bird; the only people, two black women dressed in blue uniforms and a black man on a bicycle. They looked straight ahead. They did not turn when we passed them by.
There were no “No Trespassing” signs but the walls and gates sent the message strongly enough:
Here, the vulgarity of the road stops. Here,
you enter a di ferent land.
Houses were set far back behind wide lawns; tall iron gates were shut tightly at the entrances of driveways.
Anticipating my arrival, Mrs. Burton had left her gate unlocked. The driver opened it and drove up the circular driveway. In front of us, rooms fanned out on both sides of a covered entranceway supported by white Grecian columns. The house itself was also white, but not as bright. It was built close to the ground, and though pocked with several windows, it seemed oppressive to me, a thick concrete structure, unsuited for a hot, tropical climate. The spreading green lawn gave some relief to this impression, but, like the other houses, it, too, was bounded by an iron gate.
The driver opened the car door for me, took out my bags, and deposited them on the front steps. Then he returned and stood next to the car door.
I rang the doorbell. The curtains were drawn and I could not see inside but I could hear Mrs. Burton calling, “Coming, coming.”
Father said that years ago she had arrived from England with her husband, who had some important position in the colonial government. After her husband died, she decided to stay. When I told Carlos that she must have stayed because she loved the island, he curled his lip. All English widows decide to stay, he said. Where else would their skin color have such value? Mrs. Burton, he said, could make a living in Trinidad as an interior decorator though she had no training. Being English was the only credential she needed.
I hadn’t waited long before Mrs. Burton opened the door. She was a slim woman with enormous breasts that sagged sadly to just above the waist of the blue cotton dress she was wearing. She had lived in the tropics for more than thirty years, but her skin was the color of parchment, and blue veins were visible across her cheeks and hands. She had red hair, obviously dyed, and she wore it in a short bob with bangs over her forehead that nevertheless did not hide the bald spots, close to the front of her head, where her hair had thinned. The red hair against her pale skin gave her an air of being foreign, a distinction she seemed to have nurtured, for her accent was very British.
It was my accent she commented on first after I greeted her. “Wherever did you learn to speak like that?” She made tut-tutting sounds with her tongue. “Living with servants! I told your father. It won’t do for you to keep living with servants.” She dismissed the driver, and, putting her arm around my shoulder, guided me inside. “Leave your bags here,” she said, and took the clay pot with the orchid from my hands. “Jane will get them. Jane! Jane!” she hollered.
A woman came toward us from the back. She was dressed in a uniform similar to the one I had seen worn by the two women we had passed on the street. Mrs. Burton introduced me. “Miss Virginia. She is English.”
Instinctively I shot back, “But I grew up on Chacachacare.”
“Yes, miss,” the uniformed woman said and took my bags. When she was gone, Mrs. Burton admonished me. “That was unnecessary,” she said. “Servants don’t have to know the details. You’re English and that is that. It does not matter where you grew up. Chacachacare, for God’s sake! Don’t go around announcing that to everyone. Chacachacare!”
Fearing I had made her angry, I tried to distract her. I asked her if she liked the orchid Father had sent her. She twirled the pot in her hands and examined it. I could see she was pleased. “Your father has a real talent with them,” she said. A weak smile began on the corners of her lips. “Come, I’ll show you mine.”
I followed her through a corridor leading to the backyard. On the way, I glimpsed the drawing room. It had not taken much imagination for her to replicate her decor for my father. Her drawing room was exactly like Father’s: damask curtains, polished wood floors, Persian rug, floral love seats. Father’s England.
In the backyard, she spread out her arms lovingly toward her garden. “These, my dear, are my children. Mr. Burton and I, you see, were not blessed with babies.”
Ten orchids in clay pots hung on pipes that ran across tall metal posts. I could identify some by name: the striped and spotted white-and-pink phalaenopsis; the yellow venosa; the greenish yellow dendrobium with its vivid pink center. I bent over the pale violet phalaenopsis violacea and inhaled. Mrs. Burton was delighted. “Not many people know it has a fragrance.”
“Father grows them,” I said, straightening up.
“Yes, he has the best garden in the West Indies.” She hung the orchid I had given her on the tubing and stepped back to admire it some more. “For the life of me, though,” she said, “I can’t understand why he has not named this one after him. I would have. The Mrs. Burton, I would have called it.”
“Father prefers the Latin names,” I said.
“Your father is too modest.”
But fear of discovery, not modesty, was Father’s motive. Yet, even then, I did not know the whole truth: He was not in hiding to protect me. I was a third of his life, he claimed, but it was the other two thirds he wanted to save.
“Of course I have more orchids than you see here,” Mrs. Burton was saying. “I’ve sent them off to Chelsea. Last year . . .” She paused, pushed away her bangs, and threw her head back. “Last year, my anthuriums came in second. Come, I’ll show them to you.” She led me to a canopy of vines where dozens of anthuriums bloomed in clumps on beds of coconut husks, their colors ranging from cotton white to a deep purplish red. My father had anthuriums like these, prettier than these, but I told her I had seen none better.