Читать книгу Prospero's Daughter - Elizabeth Nunez - Страница 9

TWO

CHACACHACARE, where Mumsford was heading that morning, was a leper colony. It was not always so. In the eighteenth century Spanish and French settlers brought their African slaves to the island. Within a year, working the Africans mercilessly, they turned Chacachacare into a thriving cotton plantation, one so successful that the Amerindians, who were summarily chased off the island but continued to fish close by, named the island Chacacha, the Amerindian word for cotton. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, cotton plantations in North America made growing cotton on Chacachacare no longer lucrative and the island became a seaside resort for the sons and daughters of former slave owners.

Whalers had also made a fortune in the waters around Chacachacare. Gulfo de la Ballena, Gulf of Whales, the Spanish settlers called the Gulf of Paria, the body of water cupped in the embrace of the two strips of land that extended off the western coast of Trinidad, the northern entrance guarded by the Dragon—the Dragon’s Mouth—the southern by the Serpent—the Serpent’s Mouth. Like cotton, however, whaling had come to an end long before the century closed.

Chacachacare was not a seaside resort when Dr. Peter Gardner arrived on the island with his daughter, Virginia, who had recently turned three. And strictly speaking it was not a leper colony either. Though the leprosarium continued to operate on a small scale, it was officially closed in 1950 when the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, who had ministered to the sick there, left the island enfeebled by age and the relentless sun, and unable to replenish their ranks because of a world war that had halted recruits. The Dominicans were replaced by the Sisters of Mercy from America, but life on the island among the lepers proved more than the American nuns were willing to endure. Count Finbar Ryan, archbishop of Port of Spain, had left them no room for compromise. “Sign a blank check,” he counseled those who answered his call, “and honor whatever the Lord may write on it.”

The Lord wrote more than the new nuns could bear. They lasted barely five years, until 1955, not long after a fisherman found a nun’s white habit floating on the sea off Chacachacare, a suicide attributed to depression.

In fairness to the Dominicans, they had not abandoned their patients. By the time they left, new sulphonic drugs were halting the progress of the bacteria that caused nerve ends on the afflicted to wither and die, the skin to rot, and fingers and toes to fall off. Nevertheless, the lepers begged them to stay. “The doctors seem to give us up [to] death,” one of the patients wrote, expressing the sentiments of the others in a petition sent to the governor. “The Sisters on the contrary care for us. The more miserable, pitiful, sinful we are, the more they show us love. They care for us until they have closed our eyes.”

The Dominicans had come to Trinidad from France in 1868 at the request of the British government. The leprosarium that the British had established in Cocorite, on the outskirts of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, had failed to contain the disease. It was spreading like wildfire to the city and beyond, and the British colonizers were terrified.

They were responsible, of course. It was they who had caused this disease to run amuck on the quiet, idyllic island of Trinidad, where hibiscus and bougainvillea bloomed in the sun, anthuriums in the shade, and where, in the dry season, the hills were aflame with gold and crimson blossoms from the branches of the flamboyant and dotted with the brilliant reds, yellows, pinks, and whites of the poui rising beneath a sky dazzling blue, clouds white and fluffy as new cotton.

A man could feed his family with what he hunted and fished in those days. For if you saw Trinidad from the height of an airplane, what you saw was an island floating in the delta of the Orinoco, a sliver cut off from the rain forests of the Amazon, its flora and fauna stranded with the divide. There, unlike any other island in the Caribbean chain, agouti, deer, tattou, lapp, manicou, and cats ferocious as tigers ran wild; fish and crustaceans—shrimp, lobster, crab, oyster—everyday table food. National Geographic sent in scouts. Everything they could find in the Amazon, they could find here, and there were swampy mangroves, too, and sea the color of turquoise, beaches ringed with coconut fronds and the leaves of wide sea-almond trees.

It was greed that caused the epidemic. Slavery had been abolished and the Africans, scarred by nightmares of the horrors of the plantation, had fled to the cities. Left with no workers to cut the sugarcane, process it into sugar, and ferment the juices into alcohol, for which they had developed an addiction, the British raked the slums of their continental colonies in the east. Five acres of land after five years, they promised, if the workers wanted to stay, or passage back home. Thousands came from India. They came with the disease.

At first the nuns treated the patients topically with chaulmoogra oil from the seeds of tropical trees in Asia belonging to the genus Hydnocarpus, and with cod liver oil from codfish, but the oils did not work. The disease still gutted faces, lopped off limbs. So they injected the oils, once a day, in the afternoons, and startled birds from their evening roosts when bloodcurdling screams from children, full-grown women and men, too, rent the air. Then, from late afternoon until well after the sun had set below the horizon, the sky was filled with the frantic flapping of wings, and as far away as Cocorite across the sea, street dogs howled and tears sprang from the eyes of villagers.

They ran away. They would not stay, the ones subjected to these treatments. The cure to them, the searing pain of those injections, was a million times worse than the disease. So the epidemic spread. The nuns gave the colonial government a choice: a colony in Chacachacare or the end of Trinidad. The British sent in troops. One of the nuns’ diary dated May 10, 1922, records the day:

At 6 a.m., the patients were seized with horror when the news spread throughout the wards that the whole place was surrounded and cordoned off by policemen on foot and on horseback. A dead silence set in . . . since it was impossible to escape, all had to be resigned to their fate. Some were sobbing, others fainted, and others again were seized with fits. The sisters could hardly bear the sight of the distress. Even the policemen were moved with compassion. A crowd of onlookers gathered outside to see the patients being escorted by policemen to the Cocorite pier, where a steamer was waiting to take them to Chacachacare.

The sons and daughters of slave owners who had got rich on the cotton plantations on Chacachacare did not sob and faint, but it was no less difficult to pry them away from their vacation homes. Chacachacare was Crown land; it belonged to the British royal family. When the governor issued the order, the vacationers were obliged to leave. They were compensated, of course. Even today, the descendants of some of these slave-owning families hold rights to large plots of seafront land on the offshore islands. Ninety years they were given in exchange for a meager fee, and for at least one of them, a lease that would not expire until the year 2051.

In its own way, the clergy smoothed the way for the colonial government by fanning the flames of superstition already raging in the Caribbean. To most people in this part of the world, leprosy was a curse from God, a disease of the poor and the slovenly. Even after it was renamed Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian Armauer Hansen, who had identified it in 1874, it still bore this stigma that had its roots in the Old Testament.

But leprosy was caused by bacteria, not God’s curse, and it was not absolutely clear that it was sufficiently contagious to warrant the isolation of those infected from the rest of the population. In eighty-two years, only two of the nuns succumbed to the disease. To the religious, of course, this was not proof that the disease was not contagious, but, rather, evidence of Divine intervention, God protecting those who had given themselves willingly to Him in His service. In the case of Sister Rose de Sainte Marie Vébert, who, in the opinion of many, deserved to be canonized, there seemed to be merit in this faith they had in God’s mercy. It was said that the disease had so ravaged her that it took both her tongue and her sight, though for eighteen years she continued to nurse the sick.

When she died, the hand of God was evident. Another entry in a nun’s diary dated June 17, 1937, tells the story:

The sisters kept singing hymns and canticles by her bedside to help her regain her calm when the terrible fits shook her poor body. Finally she breathed her last, gently. The sisters transported her body to the chapel. While she lay there exposed, something extraordinary happened: all traces of the awful disease disappeared from her face, and it was looking most beautiful . . .

The sisters remained in Chacachacare for twenty-eight years. Few spoke English when they first arrived and they had to rely on hand gestures and drawings before they managed to pick up the rudiments of the language from the patients. But this was not their only challenge. There was no electricity or running water in Chacachacare, and during the war years, from 1939 to 1945, when there were constant fears of German U-boats patrolling the waters, which, after all, were British waters since Trinidad belonged to England, service between the leprosarium in Chacachacare and the mainland was often curtailed, and food was scarce. Patients, who in the past were not allowed to fish or cultivate the land, now fished and grew vegetables, and, troubling for the nuns, were also permitted to work side by side with members of the opposite sex. This liberal attitude of the colonial government posed a moral problem for the nuns. They would not be the conduit for sin, 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 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 already knew the literal translation from his Spanish classes in grammar school and he conveyed his disinterest to the boatman.

“You don’t want to know why? The tourists and them always asking why. Why this, why that. Sometimes just to satisfy them, I does make up things I don’t know nothing about, but I know about Monos and Huevos.”

Mumsford was not impressed. He was more concerned about what he needed to look out for when he got to Chacachacare. “Are there monkeys on Chacachacare?” he asked.

“It don’t have no monkey on Chacachacare,” the boatman said, and undeterred, though Mumsford had positioned his back firmly against him, he informed him that the Spanish people killed all the monkeys on Monos. “They name it Monos and then they kill the Red Howlers. You think they would’ve change the name after that, right? But you wrong.”

Mumsford looked steadily in front of him.

“Is turtle egg they have on Huevos,” the boatman went on. “The turtle swim out in the sea after they lay they egg on the beach. That is how the Spanish people make it in the early days. They eat turtle egg and turtle meat. When they leave here and gone on their way discovering, they used to turn the turtle upside down on the ship so the turtle stay alive. I just can’t believe they was so bad that every day they cut off a piece of the turtle and leave them bleeding till they finish them off. But you know,” his voice became grave, “those Spanish people did some bad, bad things to the Africans they made slaves.”

Mumsford wanted him to shut up. “If there are turtle eggs on the island, the Spaniards must not have killed all the turtles,” he said mockingly. He was tired of these stories about what white men had done to Africans. The past was the past. The slaves were free now. The present was what concerned him, and in the present, his body was on fire. If the trip lasted much longer he would burn, and then in a matter of days he would start shedding like a common reptile.

“You right, sir. So I suppose you could say in the case of Huevos, the name still fit. Correct, sir?”

“Correct,” Mumsford said without enthusiasm.

The boatman said nothing more for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was so soft that Mumsford was not quite sure he had heard him correctly.

“I suppose you know the princess was there.” That was what the boatman had said, and it was only his tone that made Mumsford ask him to repeat himself, for a sly intimacy had entered his voice and Mumsford wanted to be sure.

“Yes, Princess Margaret sheself,” the boatman said.

Mumsford glared at him.

“She come with the governor-general, two, maybe three years now. She like the tortoiseshell she find there. Papers say she plan to make a comb and spectacles for sheself.”

It was not tortoiseshell; it was the shell of the hawksbill turtle, unique for its translucent amber color, some of which was speckled with black, others with green, red, or white. A letter written by a self-styled naturalist was printed in the papers warning of the extinction of the turtles if “certain royalty” insisted on killing them for combs and spectacles.

“He doesn’t dare mention the princess by name,” Mumsford had said to his mother when he read the complaint. “The coward. These are Crown lands and Crown seas. The Crown can do whatever the Crown wants with Crown property.”

“She say the water in the bay in Huevos so nice, she find it hard to leave. She bathe here all the time in she bathing suit. Between you and me,” the boatman continued confidentially, “she could have bathed naked if she want. Hardly anybody here.”

His mouth quivered slightly and Mumsford took notice when he passed his tongue across his bottom lip.

“I lucky. I get the chance to see her one day. She cheeks pink, pink, like a rose. But I never did see her in she bathing suit. If only . . .”

It was too much for him. The body of Her Royal Highness exposed to the lecherous fantasies of a common boatman! Mumsford cut him off. “How much farther?” he barked.

But if the boatman had been hurt by Mumsford’s rebuff, he soon got his revenge. They were now entering the tail end of the third boca on the approach to Rust’s Bay in Chacachacare. Waves swelled and fell in quick succession like the folds of a fan. Mumsford clutched his seat. “Hold on tight!” the boatman called out to him. The boat rose high in the air and then slapped down hard on the water. Mumsford lurched forward.

“Hold up your back!” the boatman shouted. Before Mumsford could respond, he was walking toward him. “Yes, just so,” the boatman said, and passed him, making his way to the helm of the boat. “See, I can stand up because I accustom.” He spread out his arms and legs, balancing himself perfectly though the boat pitched up and down, flinging long sprays of water at them, almost blinding Mumsford. “This is nothing. We do this all the time. I know how it bad for you people from the big countries,” he yelled over the loud thudding sounds of the hull hitting the water. “Is just a little rough passage. We go pass it soon. Don’t be frighten. Is a little thing.”

The nerves at the ends of Mumsford’s fingers were still tingling, his stomach still churning, when the boat reached calmer waters, close to the right prong of the horseshoe that was the island of Chacachacare. His face was scorched, and in spite of the seawater that had soaked his jacket, he was hot, sweaty. Only after the boat rounded the bend and a pleasant assortment of pink and ivory angles appeared at the edge of the sea, nestled in the forest of trees that fanned up an incline, did the tightness in his jaw begin to loosen.

It was the A-framed structure, with wings behind it, on top of another floor with a covered veranda, that calmed him. For suddenly in front of him were not the contours of a tropical house but of a Swiss chalet. Snow, an icy wind blowing through pine trees were what he was thinking of when he took out his handkerchief and dried the perspiration that had gathered on his brow.

“Dr. Gardner’s house, one presumes,” he said to the boatman, and allowed himself a faint smile. But the boatman said no, it was not Dr. Gardner’s house. It was the real doctor’s house.

“Real?”

“The doctor who see about the lepers.”

Disappointment brought the stiffness back in Mumsford’s jaw.

Misinterpreting the change in Mumsford’s face, the boatman added quickly, “Maybe you see him another day. He don’t always be here. He come to the island now and then to give the lepers they medicine. If you want to see him, maybe you come another time.”

Mumsford bit his lip. The house was still as a grave. As they drew nearer, it seemed all but abandoned. The pretty pink that had caught his eyes was in fact rust. The entire galvanized roof, apparently neglected for years in the sun and rain, was stained with it. In parts the rust had turned bright orange, in some places a pale pink. Close up he saw that the ivory ripples below the roof were wood slats that were spotted and scraped, in need of fresh paint. The whitewash on the concrete walls on the bottom floor was recent but it barely camouflaged the places where the concrete had begun to crumble. The wooden shutters and doors were closed. Here and there Mumsford could make out where a shutter was broken, a slat dangled from a nail. Weeds and thin patches of high grass sprouted between the dirt and stones near the concrete pillars that held up the house. The only sign of life, if it could be called a sign of life, was a brown burlap hammock on the veranda swinging listlessly in the slight breeze. Someone had strung one end to a nail on the wall of the house and the other to one of the four unpainted wood poles that supported the rusty galvanized roof covering the veranda. But there was nothing, no other trace, not a piece of clothing, not a piece of paper, not a kitchen utensil, to indicate the existence of that someone.

He was in the Land of the Dead. There were no rivers, no ponds, no freshwater anywhere on the island, the commissioner had told him. No water except what one chanced to collect when it rained.

“And the lepers?” A chill ran up his spine.

“Not to worry. They never come here. They on the other side. ’Rond the bend. They can’t see you from this side.”

“And Dr. Gardner?” It was an effort to keep his fear from affecting his voice.

“Up yonder,” the boatman said, pointing to the distance beyond the doctor’s house. “Way behind there.”

All Mumsford could see was a thick nest of trees and interlocking branches. His eyebrows converged.

“It have a road,” the boatman said sympathetically. “You get there easy.”

But no road was in sight when the boatman steered the boat to the low stone wall that separated the doctor’s house from the sea, and once on land, on the pebbled dirt yard that bordered the doctor’s house (for there was no beach), what the boatman led him to was not a road but a dirt track, bounded on either side by bushes thinned out by the sun and entwined with vines whose brown stems were as thick as rope. Stiff dried branches stuck out across the dirt track and poked his legs.

“You lucky is the dry season,” the boatman said, “or you need cutlass to pass here. The bush thick when it rain.”

Mumsford asked him about snakes. In the dry season they crawled close to houses looking for water.

“Only horsewhip,” the boatman said.

“Horsewhip? Is it poisonous?”

“We does call it horsewhip because . . .”

Lines of sweat were trickling down Mumsford’s forehead into his eyes. He lost his patience. “For God’s sake, man.” He swiped his hand across his eyes. “I don’t want to know why you call it horsewhip. I want to know if it is poisonous. Can you answer that simple question?”

“Everybody from England does want to know,” the boatman said defensively.

“I want to know if it is poisonous. Can you tell me that? ” Mumsford had moved to the middle of the dirt track, far from the edge of the bushes, and was examining the area around him.

“Is a thin, thin, green snake. Like a whip. Just sting you when it whip you. It don’t kill.”

Not poisonous. But Mumsford had no chance to savor his relief. Just when he felt the tension ease from his shoulders, the boatman reached between his belt and the waistband of his shorts and pulled out his machete.

“What?” Mumsford drew in his breath.

“Iguana,” he said, peering into the bushes. “They big like little dragon here.”

For Mumsford the trip on foot to Dr. Gardner’s house was a nightmare. His heart raced, beads of sweat collected dust on his top lip and down the sides of his bright red cheeks. He clutched his briefcase close to his chest.

“Carry that for you?” the boatman offered.

But for Mumsford the briefcase was a lifeline. It was England in a world shot backward to the heart of darkness.

Then suddenly it all changed. Then suddenly, at the end of the path where the bushes had grown wild, though now, in the dry season, were almost leafless and brown, was a meadow, a field of green stretching before him. And at the end of the field of green was a blaze of color, and behind it a white house with eaves and alcoves and large baskets of luscious green ferns hanging from the ceiling to the railings on a glorious porch.

“Dr. Gardner.” The boatman stopped. He waved his machete in the direction of the house. “Is here he live. I come back for you here. In an hour.”

It was frightening, too, all that green. Never had he seen such green, never on any lawn he knew, never even in England. For it was not simply green, it was brilliantly green. Plastic, artificially, brilliantly green. As he walked along the paved path that led to the house, he saw that the flowers, too, were brilliantly colorful, artificially colorful. But what made him suck in his breath was not the brilliance, the artificiality of color, but the variety, not of plants, but of the colors on a single plant. There, along the front of the house, were rose plants, and on each plant were flowers of every hue, and bougainvillea (yes, he was sure; he leaned in close to be sure), their petals splashed with polka dots, blue upon pink, violet on orange, yellow on red, the petals on some opened out flat like lilies.