Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 knuckles white as chalk.

      And the chauffeur had not mentioned that within minutes of leaving the calm waters of Trinidad, the boat would skirt the edges of the Dragon’s Mouth. When the boat began to rock, Mumsford found himself again at the mercy of a dark-skinned man. For the commissioner, insisting on secrecy to protect the good name of Dr. Gardner’s daughter, had not sent the government’s launch, manned by a uniformed navigational officer; he had rented a pirogue, and the man at the tiller was a fisherman, a local boatman.

      “Nothing to worry about.” The boatman grinned when Mumsford turned anxiously toward him. He was sitting sideways with the insouciance of a man on his way to a picnic, one hand steering the engine and the other waving in the air as he spoke.

      A fancy man, Mumsford thought. His life was in the hands of a fancy man. A saga boy. It was a term he had learned from the officers at the station.

      “Just the wash from the first boca, sir. We go pass far from it and I go take the boat easy, easy, past the second and the third one.”

      Mumsford clamped his hands down hard on the sides of his seat and braced himself.

      The Dragon’s Mouth. It was the channel that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Paria. Across it were underwater rocks, some visible above the surface of the sea, three large enough for the rich to build vacation homes on them.

      “The Dragon teeth,” the boatman shouted from the back of the boat. “The first two big teeth call Monos and Huevos. The last one I taking you to is Chacachacare. Is a boca in the space between each big teeth. The water bad there. It rough. He have four mouth, the Dragon.”

      Mumsford pressed down harder on his seat. Cerberus, lips drawn back in a grin of fangs, one more head to strike terror in the heart of the condemned.

      “You have nothing to worry about, sir.” The boatman’s voice rose above the drone of the boat engine. “You in good hands with me, sir.”

      In good hands? He was barefooted, dressed scantily in a loose navy T-shirt and red shorts. How could he be in good hands with this man who could not even speak proper English? He should have put more pressure on the commissioner to give him the launch, Mumsford thought, demanded he send him a man in a uniform.

      “We just pass one of the Dragon small tooth,” the boatman called out merrily. “We does call it Scorpion Island. Well, we don’t call it Scorpion no more. We call it Centipede Island now. They have more centipede there than scorpion. Centipede long, long. ’Bout twelve, fourteen, inches.”

      Mumsford looked back and saw the tiny island topped with green vegetation.

      “Don’t know if centipede long like that eat the scorpion or the centipede more frisky than scorpion. Know what I mean?” The boatman winked at him, but Mumsford was in no mood for winks. He was terrified.

      “And on Chacachacare?” he asked nervously. “Are there scorpions . . . centipedes, there?”

      “Maybe one or two scorpion, I think. Telling you the truth, sir . . .” The boatman scratched his head and wrinkled his nose. “I never hear ’bout leper dying from scorpion bite.” The idea seemed to strike him as funny. He laughed out loud. “Scorpion catch leprosy before leper die from scorpion bite. You know what I mean, sir?”

      Mumsford’s face remained resolutely serious. “So are there scorpions on Chacachacare?” he asked.

      The boatman wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I never hear about that, sir. It only have centipede, and if centipede bite you on your leg, you don’t have to bother. Just have to mash the centipede in rum and pour the rum over where they bite you. You be surprise how your leg heal up fast, fast.”

      Mumsford gritted his teeth and faced forward in his seat. He had only to step on the poisonous millepatte, the gardener had said to him, and he would get rich. Now the boatman was recommending an antidote to a centipede bite. Crush the centipede in rum, he said. Thank God he was born in England, where medicine was based on science and not in this godforsaken part of the world, where he would have been at the mercy of the superstitions of ignorant people!

      The boat rocked, but slightly, as they neared the second boca between the islands of Monos and Huevos. True to the boatman’s word, they passed its outskirts without much difficulty.

      “Dey name is Spanish. You know, from the time when Columbus and the other Spanish people came down here. Monos is monkey in Spanish,” the boatman said proudly, “and Huevos mean egg.”

      Mumsford СКАЧАТЬ