Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez
for base carnality. They had taken pains to prevent this occurrence and in this holy endeavor, the island had been their natural ally.
Chacachacare was shaped like a horseshoe. It was fairly flat in the middle with two fingers of hilly land that curved out to the sea on either side. The nuns arranged for the doctors to be on one end of this horseshoe and for them to be on the other (the doctors being male and they female). In the middle, they put the hospital and living quarters for the patients, which were strictly segregated by gender. Men and women came into contact with each other only under the supervision of the nuns or medical personnel. But all that changed with the war. The colonial government was struggling to keep its empire intact and there was no time for Chacachacare, for enforcing laws to appease the consciences of nuns.
But there were other considerations. There was the matter of babies born of the couplings of men and women riddled with the disease.
Years later, the sisters would say that the most painful task they were ever called upon to do was to take these babies away from their parents and place them in the orphanage in Trinidad. The mothers were inconsolable. They cried for weeks on end. Some, refusing to eat, died within months. Those who lived to be cured often faced rejection from their children when they went to the orphanage to collect them. No, no, you are too ugly to be my mother.
But the Chacachacare Mumsford was on his way to was a different place. There were better drugs, better treatments, and patients stayed on the colony because they chose to, because the disease had so deformed them they feared ridicule on the mainland, because they preferred to be treated at the leprosarium in Chacachacare than at the outpatient clinics in Trinidad, where they were seen as pariahs. In fact, for a brief time, between 1950 and 1952, visiting doctors performed surgeries in Chacachacare to excise and graft sagging lips, build bone nose bridges where the tissue had been eaten away, correct “claw hands,” and open eyes closed by the disease.
There was one doctor left on the island now, the commissioner had informed Mumsford. Most of the doctors had been Europeans who had come to the colony primarily to conduct research. Once that research had produced a cure, he said (Mumsford thought with some bitterness), they left for new adventures.
Was the remaining doctor Dr. Peter Gardner? Mumsford asked reasonably.
Oh no, not Dr. Peter Gardner. Yes, Gardner was a medical doctor, but he was referring to the other doctor, a local man who sometimes stayed on the island and took care of the remaining patients.
“Then what is Dr. Gardner doing there?” Mumsford asked.
The commissioner had no answer, but to Mumsford’s second question as to the character of Dr. Gardner (“What sort of man is he?” Mumsford had asked), he was quick to respond. “A gentleman. A rare breed. A white man who is not intimidated by the goings-on on the island these days.”
The harshness of his tone puzzled Mumsford. There it was, without the least prompting from him, the commissioner had spoken disparagingly about “goings-on,” and yet it had been impossible to draw him out to say unequivocally that he supported the Crown against the movement for independence.
“What goings-on?” Mumsford took the chance to ask.
“Colored people getting too big for their shoes,” the commissioner said.
And because on that point Mumsford could agree, he didn’t press him for more, he didn’t ask, as he wanted to, if he didn’t think the people in Trinidad owed a debt to England for the progress they had made, and, if owing England, they shouldn’t be willing to remain, as the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe were willing to remain, a loyal Crown colony.
The commissioner’s orders to Mumsford were to get Dr. Gardner’s deposition and to bring the alleged assailant (he could not bring himself to say rapist) back with him to Trinidad. Mumsford was not to question the English girl. In his letter, Dr. Gardner had specifically requested that no one interrogate his daughter. She was only fifteen. He did not want her involved in a scandal. He had done his part: filed the complaint and locked the savage in a pen in the back of his house. All that was left for the commissioner to do was to arrange to have the brute taken to prison.
“Of course we cannot do that,” the commissioner said to Mumsford.
“Cannot?” Again, a shadow of a doubt darkened Mumsford’s brow.
“Everything will be on the QT, of course,” the commissioner said.
“Nothing in the newspapers, or anything like that. Still, there is the matter of the law, due process. You can’t put someone in jail without some inquiry, at least the semblance of one. The monks at St. Benedict’s owe me a favor. They will keep the boy until we can lock him up.”
How long? Mumsford wanted to know.
“All the facts have to be gathered and corroborated.”
“Corroborated?”
“There has to be evidence to support the allegations. That’s your job, Mumsford. That girl Ariana has made things a little messy for us. She is a bloody liar, of course, but we need to get the evidence from Dr. Gardner. In the meanwhile, we will remove the boy. Dr. Gardner has him secured, but he can’t remain on the island with the girl, in the same house. It’s not decent.”
It was this point of decency, or rather indecency, that Mumsford was mulling over in his head as he sat back in the car that was taking him to the dock not far from Cocorite, where he would get the boat to Chacachacare. It was not only indecent for the boy to remain on the island and in the same house, it was indecent, he believed, for him to have ever been there at all.
“He was not alone,” the commissioner had explained when Mumsford raised his eyebrows. “There was also Ariana. They were both Dr. Gardner’s servants. Anyhow, there was nowhere else for them to stay.”
The explanation was not satisfactory to Mumsford. Servant or not, it was imprudent, reckless, for an English father to permit a black boy to live in the same house as his young white daughter.
Who was this man? Who was this Peter Gardner who had been so careless as to have risked the virtue of his daughter, as to have endangered her life and limb on this Land of the Dead?
He did not want to go. If the commissioner had not insisted, if Ariana had not sent a letter by the boatman full of her malicious lies, if (and this was the most compelling of all the reasons) Trinidad was not all riled up with talk about independence and colored people were not looking for any excuse to blame their failures on England, there would have been no need for him to go. The message Dr. Gardner had sent, written by his own hand and on his stationery, would have sufficed in spite of the commissioner’s admonition about the law and due process. Now he had to face the half-hour sea crossing.
He leaned forward on his seat and tapped his driver on the shoulder. “I say, what’s the sea like at this hour?” he asked.
The chauffeur looked at him through the rearview mirror. “Good, sir. Calm seas, sir,” he said.
And the sea was calm, but the chauffeur had not warned him about the jellyfish. There were hundreds of them, transparent little blue buoys, their tentacles splayed out behind them like carnival streamers, bobbing in the water around the sides of the boat. He wanted to be brave (he had felt the quivering in his neck from the moment he spotted the jellyfish), but when he raised his leg to step into the boat, his English reserve abandoned him and he found himself waving frantically to his chauffeur, who was leaning casually against the parked car, chewing a toothpick that dangled from his bottom lip.
“Driver!” he shouted. “I say, driver!”
“Sir?” The chauffeur raised his head and turned in his direction, but he remained where he was and Mumsford was forced to be explicit.
“Help me!”
In the end, though Mumsford could not avoid noticing the group of dark-skinned young men snickering in the background, he clutched the chauffeur’s arm, digging his fingers into the chauffeur’s hard flesh with such desperation that the blood drained from his hand, turning his