11
FROM THE VERANDA, Lara could see across the high walls studded with spikes of many-colored glass that enclosed her family's house. The view was one she remembered from childhood: the sky, the blue shades of the bay, the mountains beyond. That morning she was up at daybreak. The early-morning fragrances lingered until the sun had cleared the Morne and lit the green peaks and the brazen geometry of the mountains.
The night before, after the flight, she had been listening to drums from the ruinous Masonic lodge in the nearby hills. They had sounded through most of the night.
It seemed to her that when she was small there had been more birds and that they had more agreeable calls. Now there were hordes of crows, along with the vultures she remembered, clustering in the high palms. On the landward side of the house, smoke from charcoal fires almost obscured the overhanging peak. The top of the mountain was a ridge of bare rock.
"I listened to the drums last night," she told Roger Hyde.
"Did you dream?" Roger asked her. "Not at all," she said. "It's all like a dream here. It seems so strange."
"It's not a dream, baby. It's a mistake. You shouldn't have come. Especially on one of those flights."
Roger Hyde had gone to Harvard with John-Paul. He had been her brother's companion since their twenties and had spent nearly all of John-Paul's last year on the island, bringing medicine, persuading the American doctors from the medical mission to treat him.
"I've come to get what belongs to me. I have a right."
"I never thought of you as greedy, my dear."
"Don't be ridiculous," Lara said. "I have my needs here too."
Roger went and stood where he could see the rutted road that led down to the smoky plain and the sea. He stood watching.
"You're beautiful, Roger," she said. "If I were greedy I would take you. I would take you by force."
Roger's father had been a historical novelist, an African American from Boston whose books romanticized the antebellum South and were perennial bestsellers. Their heroes were spurred, booted cavaliers whose gallantry and imagined swordsmanship quickened the pulses of garden club ladies throughout the southern states. Hyde pète's novels had been often filmed by Hollywood, but the author's picture never appeared on the book jackets.
"And I would surrender," Roger said. He looked worried, but hale enough. His life suited him, she thought.
Roger's mother was French and the family had lived in Mexico. For a while Roger had tried writing in his father's genre, continuing the formula. After the first few novels it had not worked out. The themes had become embarrassing. So he had come from Mexico City to live with John-Paul at the Bay of Saints Hotel, to write travel pieces and interviews and to help with the daily administration of the place.
"Look, you should take what you think is yours and go. I'm very serious. It's quite dangerous here."
"I thought I'd do a little diving. Also, I brought a friend down."
"Are you joking?" Roger asked her. "You must assure me now. Tell me you're joking."
She had no assurances for him. She explained that Michael Ahearn would be flying in shortly.
"You know that Eustace Junot's army is defending the election. He has the Americans. Besides that, it's total disorder. Looting and daylight robbery."
"It sounds like the ocean is the place to be. I'm going swimming."
"Lara!"
"Roger," she said, "this is me. Your friend Lara. John-Paul's twin in the mysteries. I have to be here for the tetitet."
"I thought you had forgotten all that, sweetheart. Why don't you?"
She shrugged and smiled. "Not possible."
"All right," he said after a moment. "I'm seeing the European Union observer late this afternoon. There are things we need to know. Want to come?"
"After my swim."
"And you'll get to meet our associates, because they're coming in."
"Are they like the pilot I flew in with? He was silent the entire time."
"They're like that," Hyde told her. "Reserved."
She changed and went down the ancient stone stairs to the water. The shore was rocky and littered, but she had caught the pure morning light, still unmuddied by smoke and the sun. As a little girl, she had been told to throw a stone in the water to honor the god. If she forgot, the girl minding her always threw one in.
She tossed a clean stone and said the god's name. Agwe.
Working her way past bristling colonies of sea urchins, she flipped and somersaulted over the edge. She knew the reefs and rips from childhood.
The water felt good, calming and elating at once. She felt strong and composed, although she missed Michael. The prospect of the rites, though she feared them, excited her.
Dazzled by the sun, she had headed too far from shore. She treaded water and had a look around. She could feel velvety staghorn beneath her feet — the middle reef. Her brother's secret beach was around the nearest cove; with a businesslike crawl she swam past it. Halfway, she turned over and shifted to a backstroke, pulling herself along handful by handful, navigating by the slow clouds drifting in on the late breeze. Half a mile away, beyond the coral tips and visible only on the outgoing tide, was the wall that descended toward the source of creation, the place the Maroons called Guinee, purgatorial Africa, where death was better than servitude and untended souls awaited visitation, salvation, home. In that place the angry dead danced with Marinette.
Fishermen and loafers on the shore, mothers and wading children, watched her. Though she had not been to the island for more than a year, she had the feeling they knew who she was and where she was headed. She pushed on. Memory came on the taste of the ocean, the force of the withdrawing tide. Now and then she rested on her back. A diver, she was comfortable on her back, pushing along with a rowing stroke.
When she was a girl the island was a paradise without a snake, if one was a certain kind of person. Her Royal Highness appeared on the money, and the American State Department took a cheerful view of local graft.
And she, Lara, was a little white princess (practically, almost entirely), and the island, as the nostalgic saying held, was as safe as your bathtub for such as she. But history prevailed even in Paradise, a term for the island that passed gradually out of use among the most fatuous of flacks, and the ongoing curse began to sound its drums, though the cry in the street was only half heard. At first, la violencia was a new Colombian thing. Nobody owned a Walther — a cutlass sufficed.
One night at a diplomatic reception in Rodney, a handsome Frenchman approached her. He was a teacher who worked on the island with an educational foundation. In his white dinner jacket, Lara thought he was the most dashing figure she had ever seen, serious but charming. Everything about him seemed dramatic, yet not in the least theatrical.
"You're not American?" he asked her when they had been introduced.
"No." She denied it. Why not? How disagreeable to be one.
"A Creole, like myself?"
On French and Spanish islands, local white people sometimes called themselves Creoles. On British islands, never.
"Yes," she said. Curiosity led.
He turned toward a visiting American, a pleasant middle-aged baldy.
"See that man, Lara? This happy fellow?"
Smiling, she turned, expecting to be impressed.
"With these, their hatred of the darker races is the closest thing they possess to a sense of honor."
She stood for a moment still smiling, blushing, until she was able to speak.
"What a horrible thing to say!"
"Beautiful Lara," the Frenchman said. "Come and see our work in Williamstown. Our school. And I will go on saying horrible things until you believe them."
Something about him impelled her to forgive his frightening bitterness. She wanted not to come within the compass of his rage, to be forgiven. He claimed to be a Cuban; he had changed his nationality to be one with progressive humanity. She was considering her claims. You could be anything you wanted in Paradise.