The Doctor and the Diva (30 page)

“H
ow many estates does Mr. Hartley own?” Erika asked.

“Four,” Ravell said. “Three cocoa plantations, as well as the Cocal.”

As they rode through the moonlight toward Esmeralda, an estate Mr. Hartley had only recently acquired, their buggy passed huts that reverberated with the sounds of coolies chanting and beating their tomtoms. They passed one Hindu man seated in a doorway, his knees hugging his drum, his head ready to shake from his neck as his palms slapped his tom-tom’s leathery skin.

Look how much pleasure he derives from it,
Erika thought.
Lost in his rhythms, his trance.
She knew that feeling, as close as her own drumming heart.

They had to drive far to Esmeralda, fifteen miles toward the center of the island. Moonlight marked their route and poured with the whiteness of milk through the dense trees.

Finally they reached it. In a small clearing in the woods, a rough house stood. After coming through the dark trees, they might have been shifting from the darkness of midnight to the brightness of noon, for in Trinidad’s pure atmosphere, the moonlight was incandescent.

At Esmeralda the house was lifted high off the ground by poles made of balata, the wood that never rotted. A tall flight of steps led to the door.

Out of the woods, a coolie boy appeared. He bowed low and set a plate of pawpaws on a table for them. While the boy swept the floor and made up the beds, Ravell went to work clearing bats from the house. Erika waited outside, as still as a tree, a thin shawl around her.

Then the boy was gone. He ran through the undergrowth and evaporated into the forest, and they had the house to themselves.

It was a curious structure, built like a hexagon. The house had no glass windows, only hinged shutters that Ravell propped open by means of a stick, so that the sides lifted like wings. The entire room became a sort of veranda, open to the air. After eating the dinner they’d brought along, they sat there encircled by the forest and listened to the songs of the night—the strange agitation of wind, the cries of lonely animals. They stared into the dark and watched the blink of fireflies.

“How long will you live on this island?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you suppose you will ever marry and have a family?”

“I expect not,” he said.

She did not ask why he thought this. Instead, she asked him about his youth in Africa. At the age of fifteen, he had made love for the first time with a black woman from the town who liked whiskey and dancing on tables, and one night he saw her break a chair. “I have this to say about her,” Ravell confessed. “She was more alive than any person I’ve ever known.”

In the moonlight Ravell’s collar was crisp white. He wore no jacket, only a dark vest and white shirtsleeves rolled up to show his hard forearms, marked by well-developed veins. Erika studied his face, wanting to take her finger and trace the fine curve of his nose. She got up and stood behind him, and put her hands on his shoulders.

“What are you thinking?” He glanced up at her.

“How bright your shirt is.” Gently she tugged at his collar and smoothed the pointed flaps. “It’s the color of the moon.”

Ravell pushed away from his chair and stood. His arms hung rigidly at his sides and he stepped back; she sensed he meant to keep his distance from her.

“I don’t understand,” she declared in amusement. “You’ve brought me all the way here. Don’t you want me?”

He laughed and took hold of her by the waist. They fell against a bed, and tossed their garments, one by one, until each thing landed on the floor: vest, suspenders, camisole, corset, parachute of skirts. The smells of the forest were strong, and as they grew dizzy with lovemaking, the house on stilts seemed to turn like an open-air carousel.

Lying underneath him, she imagined that he must have touched many women, and she felt herself becoming all of them—an East African woman who danced on tables and broke chairs, coolie girls with rings on their toes. (
“There are women enough here to suit Ravell’s purposes,” Peter had said to her, smiling.
) His accusers from Boston blended into Erika’s senses, too—blonde Caroline, and gray-haired, leggy Amanda.

With her nose against his face, she smelled musk and remembered that day when Munga painted Ravell’s jaw white with shaving cream. She winced from pleasure, and heard the sound of her own sharp little screams.

“Shush,” he said with a jest in his tone.

“Why should I ‘shush’?”

“The animals of the forest,” he laughed. “You might scare them.”

“Taste,” Ravell said. He’d sliced a piece of fruit open, and she bent her head and filled her mouth with the sweet pulp from one of the pawpaws the servant boy had left. The fruit made a good breakfast, along with hot kola, which had the flavor of steamed chocolate.

Ravell loved to rise early—at four in the morning—so they got up then, and walked through the woods before the moon was gone, just as the sun was emerging for a new day. Their movements roused parakeets and other birds.

“If your husband were here,” Ravell remarked, “here’s a sight he would be very interested in.” He pointed to a carpenter bird boring holes into ripening cocoa pods. “Those holes will breed worms,” Ravell explained, “and the bird will come back to eat them.”

Why mention Peter? Why revive thoughts of him now? Something tightened under her ribs in annoyance. As they walked, her legs ached. Not since the earliest weeks of her marriage had she been so sore.

“Are you all right?” he asked, noticing her reluctant pace.

She nodded. At last they reached the road where they’d parked the buggy.

Driving home toward the Cocal, they met women in saris and coolie men en route to their daily labors, each politely calling
“Salaam sahib”
and
“Salaam memsahib”
in greeting.

It was not yet ten in the morning when they noticed a familiar silhouette heading on horseback in their direction. It was Munga racing toward them. Just from the lopsided way he rode—with one arm held high, flailing—they recognized that he carried a terrible message.

Munga led them to a coolie settlement miles from the Cocal, where Ravell jumped down from the carriage and ran along a dirt path to a hut. Erika tried to follow, wondering if she might assist in some way, but as they came to the little house, ducking under baskets of hibiscus at the entrance, they saw a bloody handprint on the door, and more blood trailed over the threshold. Inside the house, a woman wailed.

Ravell made a fast pivot and gripped Erika by the shoulders. “Go back,” he said. “Go to the carriage.”

Munga took up the buggy reins. Neither the servant nor Erika spoke as he drove her back to the Cocal.

It was evening before Ravell returned.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I’m not telling you anything,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to know.”

To calm himself, he walked to the beach that night. She left him to his thoughts for a time, and then she went to find him.

He sat on the sand, his knees drawn against his chest. From his pocket he removed a flask and took a swig of whiskey.

“It was not a pretty scene,” he said. “Not a thing you should have witnessed.”

The wind lifted strands of her hair, blinding her until she brushed the tangles from her eyes. She sat down and shifted her hips, the sand forming a saddle underneath her.

“When I left Boston, I vowed to do no more doctoring,” he said, “but that’s proved impossible. Am I to stand by and let a woman die at the hands of a country midwife?”

He drank more whiskey, capped the flask, and put it away. He hung his head.

“Did the mother—?”

He cut her off. “In Boston I had colleagues with whom I could discuss a traumatic case. Here, I’m alone. I practice in isolation.”

She slid her hips closer to his, inching nearer in the sand. She sensed that he did not want anyone to touch him, not at that moment. “You can tell me,” she said.

“In a village not far from here,” he said, “there’s now a newborn baby who has no mother.”

“She bled to death, didn’t she? That’s what you’re afraid to have me know.”

“If I’d arrived sooner, she might not have had any problem at all.” His lips formed a grim line. He stared at the breakers, crashing like glass. “In these rural parts, you’ve got midwives who plunge ahead and show terrible ignorance.”

“What did the midwife do?”

“Certain untrained persons believe that as soon as an infant is born, the placenta ought to follow immediately. They’re impatient. They don’t wait the extra minutes for Nature to expel the afterbirth slowly.”

He brought his fist against his mouth and kept it there, silencing himself, shutting his eyes. He would not say anything else.

Erika heard the rest of the story the next day. One of the kitchen servants had been present in the hut during the delivery—she was the one who had summoned Munga. While this older woman was describing the scene in a shrill, wild voice to the other servants, Erika entered the kitchen. The servant was reenacting how the midwife had pulled the cord and tugged with such violence that—

The servant stopped talking when Erika appeared. Two young coolie women were seated on stools, and they’d been preparing cassava, which were like yams, for supper. The Negress had been rubbing dough across a wooden board, exercising her strong, flour-covered black fingers. They had the air of sisters talking, but suddenly they hushed themselves.

“What happened?” Erika stepped closer.

The older servant hesitated, and then went on to demonstrate how the midwife had yanked the cord with such violence that she had pulled out the mother’s womb.

Erika turned and ran from the house, down to the beach. She bent in half, her arms crossed over her midsection, then dropped down onto the sand. She sat there and writhed, her hair hanging over her face, sorry she had heard it, sorry she had asked.