Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez

Author:Elizabeth Nunez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307416445
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

BUT I KNEW my own meaning, and the English I spoke conveyed well enough to Lucinda and Ariana all that I meant.

It was true that I did not speak like Gardner. I spoke English with an accent like my father’s, with a Trinidadian accent. My mother’s English was similar to Gardner’s, for though she had been raised by an Algerian nanny, her parents were English, and though she had lived in Algeria, it was in an English enclave there. But my mother loved the music of my father’s accent and encouraged me to imitate it. When my father died, it was natural for me to continue to speak the way he did. Then, too, Lucinda was taking care of me and Lucinda was Trinidadian. But I picked up habits from her that Gardner despised. I dropped my ths, replacing them with ds, and my subjects and verbs rarely agreed.

My vocabulary, no doubt, before Gardner taught me, was inadequate, but my thoughts were clear, rational. I knew who I was; I knew what was mine. I did not forget that the house we lived in and the land it stood on were not Gardner’s, that my mother had bequeathed them to me. And when I was old enough to understand my father’s poetry, I did not forget the warning so evident to me in his verses: The English had not come to save us; the English had not come to help us.

I was standing next to Gardner when he gave his version of how my house became his to the doctor who had allowed him to stay in his house before he occupied mine. Almost a year had passed and this was the first time the doctor had visited my house. He never came when my father was alive nor in the months before and after my mother’s death. Lucinda said he was jealous. Not of our new house. He had his own house in Trinidad. Bigger and better furnished than ours, she said.

“Then jealous of what?” I asked her.

“Of your father,” she said.

I thought, perhaps, he was in love with my mother but I could not have been more wrong. He hated my mother, and jealousy was the wrong word to use to describe his feelings for my father. He disliked him; he resented him for living with my mother and hated her for sharing her bed. Later, I understood that it was insecurity, fear, that made him a stranger to my house.

The doctor had attempted to come before. More than once since Gardner had moved in with us I had spied him grunting and puffing up our incline to the house. He was a heavy man, short, his legs two stumps that seemed barely able to carry the burden of his huge stomach. He would pick his way through the rough path, grabbing on to the thin stalks of bushes when he stumbled, and then staggering as he tried to prevent himself from falling when the bushes, too weak to bear his weight, bent almost to the ground.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.